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Ficção Completa
O livro reúne a ficção completa de Bruno Schulz (1892 - 1942). São dois livros de contos do autor polonês - 'Lojas de canela' e 'Sanatório sob o signo da Clepsidra' - e quatro contos inéditos em português. O livro traz 11 ilustrações do próprio escritor, autor também de uma extensa obra artística. Completam o volume trechos dos diários de Witold Gombrowicz sobre o amigo Bruno Schulz.
416 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1933
877 people are currently reading
24265 people want to read
About the author
Bruno Schulz
122 books726 followersBruno Schulz was a Polish writer, fine artist, literary critic and art teacher of Jewish descent. He was regarded as one of the great Polish-language prose stylists of the 20th century.
At a very early age, Schulz developed an interest in the arts. He studied at a gymnasium in Drohobycz from 1902 to 1910, and proceeded to study architecture at Lwów University. In 1917 he briefly studied architecture in Vienna. After World War I, the region of Galicia which included Drohobycz became a Polish territory. In the postwar period, Schulz came to teach drawing in a Polish gymnasium, from 1924 to 1941. His employment kept him in his hometown, although he disliked his profession as a schoolteacher, apparently maintaining it only because it was his sole means of income.
The author nurtured his extraordinary imagination in a swarm of identities and nationalities: a Jew who thought and wrote in Polish, was fluent in German, and immersed in Jewish culture though unfamiliar with the Yiddish language. Yet there was nothing cosmopolitan about him; his genius fed in solitude on specific local and ethnic sources. He preferred not to leave his provincial hometown, which over the course of his life belonged to four countries. His adult life was often perceived by outsiders as that of a hermit: uneventful and enclosed.
Schulz seems to have become a writer by chance, as he was discouraged by influential colleagues from publishing his first short stories. His aspirations were refreshed, however, when several letters that he wrote to a friend, in which he gave highly original accounts of his solitary life and the details of the lives of his fellow citizens, were brought to the attention of the novelist Zofia Nałkowska. She encouraged Schulz to have them published as short fiction, and The Cinnamon Shops (Sklepy Cynamonowe) was published in 1934; in English-speaking countries, it is most often referred to as The Street of Crocodiles, a title derived from one of the chapters. This novel-memoir was followed three years later by Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (Sanatorium Pod Klepsydrą). The original publications were fully illustrated by Schulz himself; in later editions of his works, however, these illustrations are often left out or are poorly reproduced. He also helped his fiancée translate Franz Kafka's The Trial into Polish, in 1936. In 1938, he was awarded the Polish Academy of Literature's prestigious Golden Laurel award.
The outbreak of World War II in 1939 caught Schulz living in Drohobycz, which was occupied by the Soviet Union. There are reports that he worked on a novel called The Messiah, but no trace of this manuscript survived his death. Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union, as a Jew he was forced to live in the ghetto of Drohobycz, but he was temporarily protected by Felix Landau, a Gestapo officer who admired his drawings. During the last weeks of his life, Schulz painted a mural in Landau's home in Drohobycz, in the style with which he is identified. Shortly after completing the work, Schulz was bringing home a loaf of bread when he was shot and killed by a German officer, Karl Günther, a rival of his protector (Landau had killed Günther's "personal Jew," a dentist). Over the years his mural was covered with paint and forgotten.
Source: wikipedia.com
At a very early age, Schulz developed an interest in the arts. He studied at a gymnasium in Drohobycz from 1902 to 1910, and proceeded to study architecture at Lwów University. In 1917 he briefly studied architecture in Vienna. After World War I, the region of Galicia which included Drohobycz became a Polish territory. In the postwar period, Schulz came to teach drawing in a Polish gymnasium, from 1924 to 1941. His employment kept him in his hometown, although he disliked his profession as a schoolteacher, apparently maintaining it only because it was his sole means of income.
The author nurtured his extraordinary imagination in a swarm of identities and nationalities: a Jew who thought and wrote in Polish, was fluent in German, and immersed in Jewish culture though unfamiliar with the Yiddish language. Yet there was nothing cosmopolitan about him; his genius fed in solitude on specific local and ethnic sources. He preferred not to leave his provincial hometown, which over the course of his life belonged to four countries. His adult life was often perceived by outsiders as that of a hermit: uneventful and enclosed.
Schulz seems to have become a writer by chance, as he was discouraged by influential colleagues from publishing his first short stories. His aspirations were refreshed, however, when several letters that he wrote to a friend, in which he gave highly original accounts of his solitary life and the details of the lives of his fellow citizens, were brought to the attention of the novelist Zofia Nałkowska. She encouraged Schulz to have them published as short fiction, and The Cinnamon Shops (Sklepy Cynamonowe) was published in 1934; in English-speaking countries, it is most often referred to as The Street of Crocodiles, a title derived from one of the chapters. This novel-memoir was followed three years later by Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (Sanatorium Pod Klepsydrą). The original publications were fully illustrated by Schulz himself; in later editions of his works, however, these illustrations are often left out or are poorly reproduced. He also helped his fiancée translate Franz Kafka's The Trial into Polish, in 1936. In 1938, he was awarded the Polish Academy of Literature's prestigious Golden Laurel award.
The outbreak of World War II in 1939 caught Schulz living in Drohobycz, which was occupied by the Soviet Union. There are reports that he worked on a novel called The Messiah, but no trace of this manuscript survived his death. Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union, as a Jew he was forced to live in the ghetto of Drohobycz, but he was temporarily protected by Felix Landau, a Gestapo officer who admired his drawings. During the last weeks of his life, Schulz painted a mural in Landau's home in Drohobycz, in the style with which he is identified. Shortly after completing the work, Schulz was bringing home a loaf of bread when he was shot and killed by a German officer, Karl Günther, a rival of his protector (Landau had killed Günther's "personal Jew," a dentist). Over the years his mural was covered with paint and forgotten.
Source: wikipedia.com
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June 15, 2025
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I have been struggling with the problem of putting my thoughts into discernible sentences, right after finishing this fantastic book by Schultz. There have been many thoughts jumping across my mind but to put them into words has become a challenging task for me. The anxiety and palpitation to put those emotions on paper are real and throbbing, for there are a few books that leave me with such rousing sensations. The Street of Crocodiles comprises interlinked stories which hit upon the humdrum of human existence in a fantastic and mysterious way. The stories challenge your understanding and perception of literature as they force you to contemplate your discernment of literature you might be boasting about. The peculiar narrator of the stories pulls you into the bizarre, unusual but curious world of his wherein the mundane elements of everyday life may take the form of something mythical and enchanted, only to reveal the deepest secrets of human existence.
The world of Schultz is dark, eerie, and grotesque with elements of fantasy and magic taking shape from normal settings of a day twisted on the trails of imagination and curiosity with serene beauty oozing out of it, wherein even the dull and tedious sacks of clothes could put the narrator in an intense contemplation to draw poetic rhymes flowing out of it, like a mystical river of free flow. These lyrical and enthralling digressions of the narrator could fill the reader with a sense of awe, forcing him to cease in an enigmatic wonder to dwell upon the poetry emanating from things as mundane as a puppy, cockroach, or a simple act of waking up. The gradual meditation puts the reader in a sense of realization that he is ostensibly not in the company of something usual. The incredulous events of unfathomable incidents, strange animals, and mystical surroundings are described with panache and with an air of comic light. The reader could feel the foreboding charm of obvious gifts of the author around him, urging him to become oblivious to everything else so that he may delve into the magical depths of Schultz’s world.
The book is organized in an unique manner, in a way that it consists of stories that are connected through common themes and characters so much so that some of the characters defy the ordeal of death and spring back to life again. The father of the narrator is one of the common threads which weave trails of magic across the stories, his name- Jacob- gives the impressions of some biblical influences. Jacob keeps on struggling on the tricky rift of being and nothingness as he gets progressively diminished from the realms of life, so that his family members become steadily ignorant of his existence, but springs back to existence from the unfathomable and limitless, unbound depths of nothingness, in some of the stories. His existence becomes so trivial and an element of farce humor that his family could not distinguish between him and cockroaches, reminds me inevitably of Kafka, as the world of Schultz seems to possess the typical eerie and dark elements of Kafkaesque world.
The influence of Kafka is obvious on the writing of Schultz as he is known to translate some of the works of the German author. However, the world of Schultz makes the reader feel the identity of its own as it is so distinctive and unique. While the world of Kafka is known for its oblong, out of the world possibilities which surreptitiously get you off guard with its measured mutations and weird unsuspected occasions, the world of Schultz is drawn out of the real town of Drogobych with realities stretched to their limits such that magic infused flawlessly to it to create a new sense of realism. The prose of the stories unavoidably and certainly reminds me of Proust, perhaps because of his richness and poetic sensibility. The prose is rich and dense which demands careful meditation, and vivid like impressionist painting but reveals itself with fierce aplomb which may send the imagination of the reader to the flight of metaphysical speculation.
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The stories are arranged in a specific manner in the book such that they reveal various facets about the life of the narrator, which incidentally relates to the childhood of the author, nudging each other on the way, only to merge in a way in the last story- The Comet- of the collection. The unifying cadence suggests that these stories are not merely a collection, rather they signify something greater from a unique whole, in a way not like a novel but forming a dynamic and lively entity with each story propagating the narrative towards that greater totality. The author brings these stories to life from the memories of his childhood, which he has to relive by infusing beautiful and cryptic inventions to them. These tales are his attempts to understand the inexplicable affairs of childhood and adolescence by bringing up the deepest secrets of his shame and panic from the deep cervices of memory. As we see in the vivid story August that the narrator’s reaction to being shown pornographic material by his cousin is confused and with trembles of anxious palpitations.
The boredom of hollowness of existence marks the main theme of the stories as we see the narrator keeps on struggling to evade that boredom by paving a middle path between its net of safety and various possibilities to get rid of it. While the narrator explores different options to bury the boredom of his existence under the enriching exploits of his imagination, his father acts as a constant medium to attract interest from people, rising up from the depths of non-existence, time and again. He is a mad scientist who experiments with rare birds (with their existence as rare as they are themselves so that it is hard to tell where from they take birth-out of life or narrator’s imagination), put forth the nature of matter to seamstresses, Adela- the housekeeper and his son. He goes on to create unimaginable, unfathomable being out of his brother-Uncle Edward, which strips his brother of his personality. As per the narrator, the world of reality constantly recreates through the Street of Crocodiles. There props a universe based in thirteenth month of the calendar wherein the rooms disappear and reappear on their own, and even human beings seem to follow a similar trend. The narrator says that reality is as thin as paper and betrays with all its cracks its imitative character. In that universe of strange prospects, the father stands as a prophet, a creator amidst the boredom in this vulnerable space of infinite possibilities but full with an eternity of loneliness. He says- There is no dead matter ... lifelessness is only a disguise behind which hide unknown forms of life. As Schultz mentions that our lives are fictions, they are full of meaningless and unconnected events and for any order or meaning, the credit should be given to the observer.
The whole of matter pulsates with infinite possibilities that send dull shivers through it. Waiting for the life-giving breath of the spirit, it is endlessly in motion. It entices us with a thousand sweet, soft, round shapes which it blindly dreams up within itself. . . . Anyone can mold it and shape it; it obeys everybody. All attempts at organizing matter are transient and temporary, easy to reverse and to dissolve.
The unusual book of extraordinary imagination has been able to convey the boredom and loneliness of human existence in a surreal and poetic manner. The bleakness of human existence has been portrayed here with a tapestry of fantasy, fear, and darkness to bring up a convoluted world of pulsating human emotions. The author takes the plunge into alternative actualities here, with reality being one of the many plausible options to escape from the brutal truths such as death and loneliness, into the comforting and embracing clutches of literature. As mentioned on the cover of the book, one may understand that the untimely death of the author stands as one of the greatest losses to modern literature but whatever he had been able to produce in his short life is good enough to mark his greatness.
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5/5
September 18, 2022
Every unique author is unique in his own way… And Bruno Schulz is one of the inarguable proofs.
And man created a mannequin… But what is much more important man created literature and peopled it with all kinds of sentient mannequins.
And miracles happen there because for a child everything that happens is a miracle full of magical mystery.
The Demiurge has had no monopoly of creation, for creation is the privilege of all spirits. Matter has been given infinite fertility, inexhaustible vitality, and, at the same time, a seductive power of temptation which invites us to create as well. In the depth of matter, indistinct smiles are shaped, tensions build up, attempts at form appear. The whole of matter pulsates with infinite possibilities that send dull shivers through it. Waiting for the life-giving breath of the spirit, it is endlessly in motion. It entices us with a thousand sweet, soft, round shapes which it blindly dreams up within itself.
And man created a mannequin… But what is much more important man created literature and peopled it with all kinds of sentient mannequins.
On that map, made in the style of baroque panoramas, the area of the Street of Crocodiles shone with the empty whiteness that usually marks polar regions or unexplored countries of which almost nothing is known. The lines of only a few streets were marked in black and their names given in simple, unadorned lettering, different from the noble script of the other captions. The cartographer must have been loath to include that district in the city and his reservations found expression in the typographical treatment.
And miracles happen there because for a child everything that happens is a miracle full of magical mystery.
August 28, 2020
Imaginative Borges-like fantasy and wildly descriptive writing in this collection of connected short stories that are semi-autobiographical. Who else can write fascinating paragraphs about bedclothes like this, from the story “Uncle Charles”?
“Since his wife’s departure, the house had not been cleaned, the bed not made. Charles returned home late at night, battered and bruised by the nightly revels to which he succumbed under the pressure of the hot empty days. The crushed, cool, disordered bedclothes seemed like a blissful haven, an island of safety on which he succeeded in landing with the last ounce of his strength like a castaway, tossed for many days and nights on a stormy sea….Groping blindly in the darkness, he sank between the white mounds of cool feathers and slept as he fell, across the bed or with his head downward, pushing deep into the softness of the pillows, as if in sleep he wanted to drill through, to explore completely, that powerful massif of feather-bedding rising out of the night. He fought in his sleep against the bed like a bather swimming against the current, he kneaded it and molded it with his body like an enormous bowl of dough, and woke up at dawn panting, covered with sweat, thrown up on the shores of that pile of bedding which he could not master in the nightly struggle. Half-landed from the depth of unconsciousness, he still hung on the verge of night, gasping for breath, while the bedding grew around him, swelled and fermented - and again engulfed him in a mountain of heavy, whitish dough.”
The book blurb gives a good summary: The Street of Crocodiles in the Polish city of Drogobych is a street of memories and dreams where recollections of Bruno Schulz's uncommon boyhood and of the eerie side of his merchant family's life are evoked in a startling blend of the real and the fantastic. Most memorable - and most chilling - is the portrait of the author's father, a maddened shopkeeper who imports rare birds' eggs to hatch in his attic, who believes tailors' dummies should be treated like people, and whose obsessive fear of cockroaches causes him to resemble one.
For most of the remainder of the review I’ll let the author speak for himself. Here’s a passage where the family housekeep takes him to the home of a maid who has a mentally challenged daughter:
“Once Adela took me to the old woman’s house. It was early in the morning when we entered the small blue-walled room, with its mud floor, lying in a patch of bright yellow sunlight in the still of the morning broken only by the frightening loud ticking of a cottage clock on the wall. In a straw-filled chest lay the foolish Maria, white as a wafer and motionless like a glove from which a hand had been withdrawn. And, as if taking advantage of her sleep, the silence talked, the yellow, bright, evil silence delivered its monologue, argued, and loudly spoke its vulgar maniacal soliloquy. Maria’s time – the time imprisoned in her soul - had left her and – terribly real - filled the room, vociferous and hellish in the bright silence of the morning, rising from the noisy mill of the clock like a cloud of bad flour, powdery flower, the stupid flower of madmen.”
From the story “The Gale”:
“The gale blew cold and dead colors onto the sky – streaks of green, yellow, and violet – the distant vaults and arcades of its spirals. The roofs loomed black and crooked, apprehensive and expectant. Those under which the wind had already penetrated, rose in inspiration, outgrew the neighboring roofs and prophesied doom under the unkempt sky. Then they fell and expired, unable to hold any longer the powerful breath which then moved farther along and filled the whole space with noise and terror. And yet more houses rose with a scream, in a paroxysm of prediction, and howled disaster.”
A description of his father’s tailor shop from “The Night of the Great Season”:
“The depth of the large shop became, from day to day, darker and richer, with stocks of cloth, surge, velvet, and cord. On the somber shelves, those granaries and silos, the cool, felted fabrics matured and yielded interest. The powerful capital of autumn multiplied and mellowed. It grew and ripened and spread, ever wider, until the shelves resembled the rows of some great amphitheater. It was augmented daily by new loads of goods brought in crates and bales in the cool of the morning on the broad, bearlike shoulders of groaning, bearded porters who exuded an aura of autumn freshness mixed with vodka. The shop assistants unpacked these new supplies and filled with their rich, drapery colors, as with putty, all the holes and cracks of the tall cupboards. They ran the gamut of all the autumn shades and went up and down through the octaves of color. Beginning at the bottom they tried shyly and plaintively the contralto semitones, passed on to the washed-out grays of distance, to tapestry blues and, going upward in ever broader cords, reached deep royal blues, the indigo of distant forests and the plush of rustling parks, in order to enter, through the ochres, reds, tans, and sepias, the whispering shadows of wilting gardens, and to reach finally the dark smell of fungi, the waft of mold in the depth of autumn nights and the dull accompaniment of the darkest basses.”
The blubs also say that Bruno Schulz (b. 1892), a Polish Jew shot on the streets of Warsaw during a pogrom by the Nazis in 1942, is considered by many to have been the leading Polish writer between the two world wars.
His extreme shyness was almost a disability and he wrote most of these stories in correspondence with a woman who encouraged him to keep sending them.
A fascinating book that I am adding to my favorites for its literary value.
Top photo of Warsaw in the 1930's from vintag.es
Jews arrested in Warsaw heading to Treblinka concentration camp from historyplace.com
The author from newyorker.com
“Since his wife’s departure, the house had not been cleaned, the bed not made. Charles returned home late at night, battered and bruised by the nightly revels to which he succumbed under the pressure of the hot empty days. The crushed, cool, disordered bedclothes seemed like a blissful haven, an island of safety on which he succeeded in landing with the last ounce of his strength like a castaway, tossed for many days and nights on a stormy sea….Groping blindly in the darkness, he sank between the white mounds of cool feathers and slept as he fell, across the bed or with his head downward, pushing deep into the softness of the pillows, as if in sleep he wanted to drill through, to explore completely, that powerful massif of feather-bedding rising out of the night. He fought in his sleep against the bed like a bather swimming against the current, he kneaded it and molded it with his body like an enormous bowl of dough, and woke up at dawn panting, covered with sweat, thrown up on the shores of that pile of bedding which he could not master in the nightly struggle. Half-landed from the depth of unconsciousness, he still hung on the verge of night, gasping for breath, while the bedding grew around him, swelled and fermented - and again engulfed him in a mountain of heavy, whitish dough.”
The book blurb gives a good summary: The Street of Crocodiles in the Polish city of Drogobych is a street of memories and dreams where recollections of Bruno Schulz's uncommon boyhood and of the eerie side of his merchant family's life are evoked in a startling blend of the real and the fantastic. Most memorable - and most chilling - is the portrait of the author's father, a maddened shopkeeper who imports rare birds' eggs to hatch in his attic, who believes tailors' dummies should be treated like people, and whose obsessive fear of cockroaches causes him to resemble one.
For most of the remainder of the review I’ll let the author speak for himself. Here’s a passage where the family housekeep takes him to the home of a maid who has a mentally challenged daughter:
“Once Adela took me to the old woman’s house. It was early in the morning when we entered the small blue-walled room, with its mud floor, lying in a patch of bright yellow sunlight in the still of the morning broken only by the frightening loud ticking of a cottage clock on the wall. In a straw-filled chest lay the foolish Maria, white as a wafer and motionless like a glove from which a hand had been withdrawn. And, as if taking advantage of her sleep, the silence talked, the yellow, bright, evil silence delivered its monologue, argued, and loudly spoke its vulgar maniacal soliloquy. Maria’s time – the time imprisoned in her soul - had left her and – terribly real - filled the room, vociferous and hellish in the bright silence of the morning, rising from the noisy mill of the clock like a cloud of bad flour, powdery flower, the stupid flower of madmen.”
From the story “The Gale”:
“The gale blew cold and dead colors onto the sky – streaks of green, yellow, and violet – the distant vaults and arcades of its spirals. The roofs loomed black and crooked, apprehensive and expectant. Those under which the wind had already penetrated, rose in inspiration, outgrew the neighboring roofs and prophesied doom under the unkempt sky. Then they fell and expired, unable to hold any longer the powerful breath which then moved farther along and filled the whole space with noise and terror. And yet more houses rose with a scream, in a paroxysm of prediction, and howled disaster.”
A description of his father’s tailor shop from “The Night of the Great Season”:
“The depth of the large shop became, from day to day, darker and richer, with stocks of cloth, surge, velvet, and cord. On the somber shelves, those granaries and silos, the cool, felted fabrics matured and yielded interest. The powerful capital of autumn multiplied and mellowed. It grew and ripened and spread, ever wider, until the shelves resembled the rows of some great amphitheater. It was augmented daily by new loads of goods brought in crates and bales in the cool of the morning on the broad, bearlike shoulders of groaning, bearded porters who exuded an aura of autumn freshness mixed with vodka. The shop assistants unpacked these new supplies and filled with their rich, drapery colors, as with putty, all the holes and cracks of the tall cupboards. They ran the gamut of all the autumn shades and went up and down through the octaves of color. Beginning at the bottom they tried shyly and plaintively the contralto semitones, passed on to the washed-out grays of distance, to tapestry blues and, going upward in ever broader cords, reached deep royal blues, the indigo of distant forests and the plush of rustling parks, in order to enter, through the ochres, reds, tans, and sepias, the whispering shadows of wilting gardens, and to reach finally the dark smell of fungi, the waft of mold in the depth of autumn nights and the dull accompaniment of the darkest basses.”
The blubs also say that Bruno Schulz (b. 1892), a Polish Jew shot on the streets of Warsaw during a pogrom by the Nazis in 1942, is considered by many to have been the leading Polish writer between the two world wars.
His extreme shyness was almost a disability and he wrote most of these stories in correspondence with a woman who encouraged him to keep sending them.
A fascinating book that I am adding to my favorites for its literary value.
Top photo of Warsaw in the 1930's from vintag.es
Jews arrested in Warsaw heading to Treblinka concentration camp from historyplace.com
The author from newyorker.com
June 27, 2023
Bruno Schulz was another brilliant writer killed by the Nazi regime. It makes me angry how many wonderful books we missed because of the Holocaust and not only. Bruno Schulz only managed to leave us only a collection of short stories, but of a high value. I only read the The Street of Crocodiles but I appreciated it enough to buy a newly published translation of his works in Romanian. Unfortunately, I do not remember anything about this story read 4 months ago. I only vaguely remember the feeling of strangeness that I had while reading.
February 28, 2019
”They maintain that every woman in that district is a tart. In fact, it is enough to stare at any of them, and at once you meet an insistent clinging look which freezes you with the certainty of fulfillment. Even the schoolgirls wear their hair ribbons in a characteristic way and walk on their slim legs with a peculiar step, an impure expression in their eyes that foreshadows their future corruption.”
Schulz sketch
There is a sexual madness bubbling in the corners of every scene in this collection. Desire is wrapped around the words of the text squeezing them tight, producing extended breasts, hips, and flared stocking clad legs. The young lad, who is our narrator, is of age to be beset by those hormones that make every female seem like the personification of Aphrodite. Even the glimpse of an elbow or a soft white neck or a foot can give a young man flutters in his stomach. ”She then moved her chair forward and, without getting up from it, lifted her dress to reveal her foot tightly covered in black silk, and then stretched out stiffly like a serpent’s head.”
His father was a merchant and quite insane. Shulz shares with us the slow degradation of his father’s mind as fears overcome reason. ”He lay on the floor naked, stained with black totem spots, the lines of his ribs heavily outlined, the fantastic structure of his anatomy visible through the skin; he lay on his face, in the grip of the obsession of loathing which dragged him into the abyss of its complex paths. He moved with the many-limbed, complicated movements of a strange ritual in which I recognized with horror an imitation of the ceremonial crawl of a cockroach.”
If this were a Greek play, cockroaches would be the chorus.
Schulz self-portrait.
Schulz’s had a deep command of language. He used archaic words and put sentences together in ways I’ve never experienced before. All the stories are connected but disjointed, and Schulz would often spin this reader off into the snow, leaving me spitting slivers of ice from my mouth. I always ran after the sled and climbed back on to watch with slitted eyes for low hanging tree limbs to duck and to be prepared to pull my snagged coat loose from the dead, brittle bushes overhanging the road. ”We walked alongside the hairy rim of darkness, brushing against the furry bushes, their lower branches snapping under our feet in the bright night, in a false milky brightness. The diffuse whiteness of light filtered by the snow, by the pale air, by the milky space, was like the gray paper of an engraving on which the thick bushes corresponded to the deep black lines of the decoration.”
I could share so many more instances of superb, unusual writing that make the head soar with the headiness of the visions he created, but I do have to let you experience most of them in the course of reading the stories for yourself.
Bruno Schulz was a Polish Jew from Drohobycz and, unfortunately, was caught up in the events of WW2. He was moved into a ghetto. He was discovered by an admirer of his writing, a Nazi Gestapo officer named Felix Landau. He was commissioned by Landau, in exchange for protection, to paint a mural on a wall of his residency in Drohobycz. Schulz had it better than most, but fate is a fickle wench, and on November 19th, 1942, he was gunned down while walking home with a loaf of bread by another Gestapo officer, Karl Gunther, who was enraged that Landau had shot and killed one of his personal Jews.
What a gift to humanity it would have been if the Nazi officers had just had the decency to shoot each other.
The mural was covered over and wasn’t rediscovered until 2001.
A piece of the mural.
This collection is just a glimpse of the body of work that we would have enjoyed from this talented writer if his life had not been tragically cut short. He was working on a novel at the time of his murder, but it has never surfaced. There is always hope that someday it will been found. People compare Schulz to Kafka and other writers who push the boundaries of reality, but to me he isn’t like those other writers. He was a new star with his own unique spectrum who became a supernova before he had a chance to shine across the universe.
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Schulz sketch
There is a sexual madness bubbling in the corners of every scene in this collection. Desire is wrapped around the words of the text squeezing them tight, producing extended breasts, hips, and flared stocking clad legs. The young lad, who is our narrator, is of age to be beset by those hormones that make every female seem like the personification of Aphrodite. Even the glimpse of an elbow or a soft white neck or a foot can give a young man flutters in his stomach. ”She then moved her chair forward and, without getting up from it, lifted her dress to reveal her foot tightly covered in black silk, and then stretched out stiffly like a serpent’s head.”
His father was a merchant and quite insane. Shulz shares with us the slow degradation of his father’s mind as fears overcome reason. ”He lay on the floor naked, stained with black totem spots, the lines of his ribs heavily outlined, the fantastic structure of his anatomy visible through the skin; he lay on his face, in the grip of the obsession of loathing which dragged him into the abyss of its complex paths. He moved with the many-limbed, complicated movements of a strange ritual in which I recognized with horror an imitation of the ceremonial crawl of a cockroach.”
If this were a Greek play, cockroaches would be the chorus.
Schulz self-portrait.
Schulz’s had a deep command of language. He used archaic words and put sentences together in ways I’ve never experienced before. All the stories are connected but disjointed, and Schulz would often spin this reader off into the snow, leaving me spitting slivers of ice from my mouth. I always ran after the sled and climbed back on to watch with slitted eyes for low hanging tree limbs to duck and to be prepared to pull my snagged coat loose from the dead, brittle bushes overhanging the road. ”We walked alongside the hairy rim of darkness, brushing against the furry bushes, their lower branches snapping under our feet in the bright night, in a false milky brightness. The diffuse whiteness of light filtered by the snow, by the pale air, by the milky space, was like the gray paper of an engraving on which the thick bushes corresponded to the deep black lines of the decoration.”
I could share so many more instances of superb, unusual writing that make the head soar with the headiness of the visions he created, but I do have to let you experience most of them in the course of reading the stories for yourself.
Bruno Schulz was a Polish Jew from Drohobycz and, unfortunately, was caught up in the events of WW2. He was moved into a ghetto. He was discovered by an admirer of his writing, a Nazi Gestapo officer named Felix Landau. He was commissioned by Landau, in exchange for protection, to paint a mural on a wall of his residency in Drohobycz. Schulz had it better than most, but fate is a fickle wench, and on November 19th, 1942, he was gunned down while walking home with a loaf of bread by another Gestapo officer, Karl Gunther, who was enraged that Landau had shot and killed one of his personal Jews.
What a gift to humanity it would have been if the Nazi officers had just had the decency to shoot each other.
The mural was covered over and wasn’t rediscovered until 2001.
A piece of the mural.
This collection is just a glimpse of the body of work that we would have enjoyed from this talented writer if his life had not been tragically cut short. He was working on a novel at the time of his murder, but it has never surfaced. There is always hope that someday it will been found. People compare Schulz to Kafka and other writers who push the boundaries of reality, but to me he isn’t like those other writers. He was a new star with his own unique spectrum who became a supernova before he had a chance to shine across the universe.
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February 5, 2020
A strange, uneven book of fiction, but one that is oddly compelling. It is somewhat like magic realism, but more primeval and mythic than the dark fairy tales of Marquez. It is a little like Kafka too, but much more energetic, teeming with life.
If Egon Schiele wrote fiction, it might be something like this.
March 21, 2019
Before Bruno Schulz was shot in the street in one of the many actions of Nazi Terror in 1942, he was a unique human being with a beautiful sense of humour and a lightness that makes one feel sad.
Before Bruno Schulz fell victim to the absurdity of fascist hatred, he was a writer of seemingly endless imagination, who could find magic in the smallest of circumstances and even let a Tailor's Dummy have its rights.
Before Bruno Schulz lost his life and most of his writing to the worst criminal reign in European history, he filled pages with sparkling life, and sent them in envelopes to be received by his ONE FIRST READER.
Before Bruno Schulz became one of the few known victims of the Nazis who stand as symbols for all those countless common people with equal rights to remembrance and love who were wiped out without a trace left, he was a master of village life description.
The terror of tickling is vivid in the book that preceded the terror of mass murder.
Imagine a world in which tickling is still a threat. Imagine a world in which people can still live their boring lives in small towns without worrying that the big hatred may strike with the power of empathy-free psychopathy turned epidemic.
Imagine the world of The Street Of Crocodiles still intact in our hearts.
Imagine!
For imagination and empathy are siblings that need to go hand in hand in our absurd world.
To Bruno Schulz, lest we forget:
"The Demiurge," said my father, " has had no monopoly of creation, for creation is the privilege of all spirits."
Destruction is for those whose only privilege is that they have a weapon in their hand and jealousy in their hearts, but no imaginative power of their own to create a world for themselves. Thus the urge to destroy others.
Before Bruno Schulz fell victim to the absurdity of fascist hatred, he was a writer of seemingly endless imagination, who could find magic in the smallest of circumstances and even let a Tailor's Dummy have its rights.
Before Bruno Schulz lost his life and most of his writing to the worst criminal reign in European history, he filled pages with sparkling life, and sent them in envelopes to be received by his ONE FIRST READER.
Before Bruno Schulz became one of the few known victims of the Nazis who stand as symbols for all those countless common people with equal rights to remembrance and love who were wiped out without a trace left, he was a master of village life description.
The terror of tickling is vivid in the book that preceded the terror of mass murder.
Imagine a world in which tickling is still a threat. Imagine a world in which people can still live their boring lives in small towns without worrying that the big hatred may strike with the power of empathy-free psychopathy turned epidemic.
Imagine the world of The Street Of Crocodiles still intact in our hearts.
Imagine!
For imagination and empathy are siblings that need to go hand in hand in our absurd world.
To Bruno Schulz, lest we forget:
"The Demiurge," said my father, " has had no monopoly of creation, for creation is the privilege of all spirits."
Destruction is for those whose only privilege is that they have a weapon in their hand and jealousy in their hearts, but no imaginative power of their own to create a world for themselves. Thus the urge to destroy others.
March 12, 2020
There Is No Dead Matter
No one knows how to distinguish living from non-living matter. At the boundary between them the A-level “7 Characteristics of Life” break down. Viruses, some organic chemical compounds, prions, perhaps some bacteria, among other things don’t fit neatly into the biological vs. merely material categorisation. We are accustomed to thinking in Darwinian terms: Mind, we presume, emerges in an evolutionary process from matter.
But the 19th century American philosopher C. S. Peirce audaciously suggested that we have it the wrong way round. For Peirce, matter is a degraded, and therefore a potentially upgradable, form of mind or spirit. Spirit and matter transform mutually into each other; they are alternative forms of that which is.* The 17th century Dutch philosopher, Baruch Spinoza, would have felt comfortable with Peirce in his intimations of a world imbued with the divine.
Bruno Schulz likely never heard of Peirce, but he would have known about Spinoza in his Galician Jewish community; and he certainly subscribed to Peirce’s philosophy. “There is no dead matter…lifelessness is only a disguise behind which hide unknown forms of life,” one of Schultz's characters announces. It is not just life which is deserving of respect in The Street of Crocodiles but literally everything that exists, all matter sentient or inert. Both these forms are temporary; each is necessary for the other, and for the emergence of new forms which are at any moment inconceivable. Such unexpected forms are nonetheless inherent in the infinite possibilities in matter.
This attitude has profound consequences. Nothing, for example, is undeserving of one’s attention. Importance does not lie in magnitude or mass but in delicate, not necessarily conventionally beautiful, form. The creeping dementia of one’s parent, for example, is such a form, as it literally transforms its victim from an urban shopkeeper into, temporarily at least, an Old Testament prophet: “He was like a magic mill, into the hoppers of which the bran of empty hours was poured, to re-emerge flowering in all the colours and scents of Oriental spices.”
This is remarkably similar to the ethos espoused by Peirce: “What is man? What a strange union of matter and mind! A machine for converting material into spiritual force." So too, for Schulz, a retarded village orphan, a puppy, a familiar building, a ghoulish tramp, or a deadly boring winter’s day can be appreciated for the potential they hold. He therefore contends that “…we should weep…at our own fate, when we see that misery of violated matter, against which a terrible wrong has been committed.”
Of course this unconventionality can and does lead to The Great Heresy of man as Creator. It is proclaimed by Schulz’s father in his state of advanced insight/dementia: “If, forgetting the respect due to the Creator, I were to attempt a criticism of creation, I would say ‘Less matter, more form!’" And it is through an imagination worthy of Mervyn Peake that Schulz lays in the forms missed by the divine Creator. Whereas God, as the gnostic Demiurge “…was in love with consummate, superb, and complicated materials; we shall give priority to trash. We are simply entranced and enchanted by the cheapness, shabbiness, and inferiority of material.”
The demented father, therefore, re-creates creation out of the Demiurge’s dross. He makes new forms of life beyond that which even God had contemplated,
In my experience Schulz’s prose and imagination are unique. Among other things, he doesn’t narrate a story, yet still manages to convey a way of being so intimately and concisely that one feels a profoundly important tale has been told. But unlike a Proust who dwells almost interminably on each and every detail so that one can feel deadened by description, Schulz moves his attention continuously to yet another interesting thing so that his exquisitely laconic descriptions have wonderful force.
Schulz's language is somehow comforting while simultaneously unusual and exotic. The effect is not unlike that of Borges in the osmotic passage from the real of the quotidian to the hyper-real of imagination. In the manner of another contemporary, the English Charles Williams, his forms appear sometimes as if a wind from the mouth of God that threatens to consume the world; sometimes as the indistinct but overpowering sound of a mob or crowd of shoppers; sometimes as apocalyptic signs in the air and water; once as the visage of crumbly old Aunt Wanda conjured up on the back of a dining room chair.
I have a conceit that if C. S. Peirce or Spinoza could have written poetic prose it would look like this.
* I suspect that both Schulz and Peirce received at least some of their inspiration for this idea from the 16th century Italian, Giordano Bruno. See: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
The Polish Science-fi writer Stanislaw Lem also has a rather interesting variation on this idea of the relation of mind to matter emphasising the latter as superior: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
No one knows how to distinguish living from non-living matter. At the boundary between them the A-level “7 Characteristics of Life” break down. Viruses, some organic chemical compounds, prions, perhaps some bacteria, among other things don’t fit neatly into the biological vs. merely material categorisation. We are accustomed to thinking in Darwinian terms: Mind, we presume, emerges in an evolutionary process from matter.
But the 19th century American philosopher C. S. Peirce audaciously suggested that we have it the wrong way round. For Peirce, matter is a degraded, and therefore a potentially upgradable, form of mind or spirit. Spirit and matter transform mutually into each other; they are alternative forms of that which is.* The 17th century Dutch philosopher, Baruch Spinoza, would have felt comfortable with Peirce in his intimations of a world imbued with the divine.
Bruno Schulz likely never heard of Peirce, but he would have known about Spinoza in his Galician Jewish community; and he certainly subscribed to Peirce’s philosophy. “There is no dead matter…lifelessness is only a disguise behind which hide unknown forms of life,” one of Schultz's characters announces. It is not just life which is deserving of respect in The Street of Crocodiles but literally everything that exists, all matter sentient or inert. Both these forms are temporary; each is necessary for the other, and for the emergence of new forms which are at any moment inconceivable. Such unexpected forms are nonetheless inherent in the infinite possibilities in matter.
This attitude has profound consequences. Nothing, for example, is undeserving of one’s attention. Importance does not lie in magnitude or mass but in delicate, not necessarily conventionally beautiful, form. The creeping dementia of one’s parent, for example, is such a form, as it literally transforms its victim from an urban shopkeeper into, temporarily at least, an Old Testament prophet: “He was like a magic mill, into the hoppers of which the bran of empty hours was poured, to re-emerge flowering in all the colours and scents of Oriental spices.”
This is remarkably similar to the ethos espoused by Peirce: “What is man? What a strange union of matter and mind! A machine for converting material into spiritual force." So too, for Schulz, a retarded village orphan, a puppy, a familiar building, a ghoulish tramp, or a deadly boring winter’s day can be appreciated for the potential they hold. He therefore contends that “…we should weep…at our own fate, when we see that misery of violated matter, against which a terrible wrong has been committed.”
Of course this unconventionality can and does lead to The Great Heresy of man as Creator. It is proclaimed by Schulz’s father in his state of advanced insight/dementia: “If, forgetting the respect due to the Creator, I were to attempt a criticism of creation, I would say ‘Less matter, more form!’" And it is through an imagination worthy of Mervyn Peake that Schulz lays in the forms missed by the divine Creator. Whereas God, as the gnostic Demiurge “…was in love with consummate, superb, and complicated materials; we shall give priority to trash. We are simply entranced and enchanted by the cheapness, shabbiness, and inferiority of material.”
The demented father, therefore, re-creates creation out of the Demiurge’s dross. He makes new forms of life beyond that which even God had contemplated,
“…these primitive forms were unremarkable compared with the richness of shapes and the splendour of the pseudofauna and pseudoflora, which sometimes appeared in certain strictly defined environments, such as old apartments saturated with the emanations of numerous existences and events; used-up atmospheres, rich in the specific ingredients of human dreams; rubbish heaps abounding in the humus of memories, of nostalgia, and of sterile boredom. On such soil, this pseudovegetation sprouted abundantly yet ephemerally, brought forth short-lived generations which flourished suddenly and splendidly, only to wilt and perish.”The pathos is increased infinitely when one knows his fate as a Jew in Galicia - shot as less than vermin by an eminently disrespectful SS officer.
In my experience Schulz’s prose and imagination are unique. Among other things, he doesn’t narrate a story, yet still manages to convey a way of being so intimately and concisely that one feels a profoundly important tale has been told. But unlike a Proust who dwells almost interminably on each and every detail so that one can feel deadened by description, Schulz moves his attention continuously to yet another interesting thing so that his exquisitely laconic descriptions have wonderful force.
Schulz's language is somehow comforting while simultaneously unusual and exotic. The effect is not unlike that of Borges in the osmotic passage from the real of the quotidian to the hyper-real of imagination. In the manner of another contemporary, the English Charles Williams, his forms appear sometimes as if a wind from the mouth of God that threatens to consume the world; sometimes as the indistinct but overpowering sound of a mob or crowd of shoppers; sometimes as apocalyptic signs in the air and water; once as the visage of crumbly old Aunt Wanda conjured up on the back of a dining room chair.
I have a conceit that if C. S. Peirce or Spinoza could have written poetic prose it would look like this.
* I suspect that both Schulz and Peirce received at least some of their inspiration for this idea from the 16th century Italian, Giordano Bruno. See: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
The Polish Science-fi writer Stanislaw Lem also has a rather interesting variation on this idea of the relation of mind to matter emphasising the latter as superior: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
October 21, 2024
This is an astonishingly inventive and imaginative (autobiographical?) book by the Polish author Bruno Schulz, whom I didn’t know until he was recommended to me by one of my Goodreads friends. The book is in fact an epistolary collection of mythopoetic short stories and a metaphysical tour-de-force, all rolled up into one of the most entertaining and thought-provoking works I have ever read!
What is the book about? Well might you ask, even after you’ve read it! To me it is all about mythologising reality, but also asking questions about the very nature of reality! Many of the protagonists are mentally disturbed, serving roles as people who perceive reality in different ways to us boring ‘normal’ people. Foremost among these is the narrator’s father, who’s obviously schizophrenic, but who provides a metaphysical conduit for many of the stories. All the topics relevant to metaphysics are there: demiurgy and cosmogony, individuation, metamorphosis and transmogrification, spontaneous generation, immortality, etc., etc. The symbols and metaphors Schulz uses are many and varied: labyrinths and mazes, golems and automatons, and always, always birds and cockroaches!
The book is written with astounding style and language, providing unforgettable imagery, often laced with dry humour. E.g. the last story “Comet” is a dazzling piece of Gallows humour on the imminent end of the world! Very early on I noticed numerous anthropomorphising descriptions, not just of animals, but even inanimate objects. Obviously that is a deliberate and intentional story-telling device very suitable to the contents of these amazing metaphysical tales. The pacing of the stories is also masterful: often starting lyrically and slowly, then using a crescendo leading up to a climax, followed by a whimsical or funereal coda.
There is some confusion regarding the name of this book. The original Polish title is “Sklepy Cynamonowe”, which obviously is the name of one of the individual stories: “Cinnamon Shops”. For some reason the title of the English translation is usually rendered as “The Street of Crocodiles”, the name of another constituent story. Both stories are brilliant! “Cinnamon Shops” is a beautiful dream-like sequence. In it there are the eponymous shops, which incidentally don’t sell spices but are mysterious establishments that offer curiosities and books; they are called thus because of the dark panelling of their walls. “The Street of Crocodiles”, on the other hand, describes a part of town that’s “Pseudo-American” (Schulz’s expression, not mine!), lascivious, and superficial. It only exists in black-and-white and is described by the author as “half-baked and [of an] undecided reality”.
The translation into English is also brilliant. Celina Wieniewska did a sterling job, making everything sound and feel perfectly lucid and idiomatic. I don’t have any Polish but translating Bruno Schulz cannot be easy!
Verdict: a book unlike any other I have ever read: automatic 5 stars and promotion to my ‘all-time-favourites’ bookshelf. By the way: you can easily read this slim volume in a few hours; then cogitate its contents, which are biblical in proportion, for a few months!
What is the book about? Well might you ask, even after you’ve read it! To me it is all about mythologising reality, but also asking questions about the very nature of reality! Many of the protagonists are mentally disturbed, serving roles as people who perceive reality in different ways to us boring ‘normal’ people. Foremost among these is the narrator’s father, who’s obviously schizophrenic, but who provides a metaphysical conduit for many of the stories. All the topics relevant to metaphysics are there: demiurgy and cosmogony, individuation, metamorphosis and transmogrification, spontaneous generation, immortality, etc., etc. The symbols and metaphors Schulz uses are many and varied: labyrinths and mazes, golems and automatons, and always, always birds and cockroaches!
The book is written with astounding style and language, providing unforgettable imagery, often laced with dry humour. E.g. the last story “Comet” is a dazzling piece of Gallows humour on the imminent end of the world! Very early on I noticed numerous anthropomorphising descriptions, not just of animals, but even inanimate objects. Obviously that is a deliberate and intentional story-telling device very suitable to the contents of these amazing metaphysical tales. The pacing of the stories is also masterful: often starting lyrically and slowly, then using a crescendo leading up to a climax, followed by a whimsical or funereal coda.
There is some confusion regarding the name of this book. The original Polish title is “Sklepy Cynamonowe”, which obviously is the name of one of the individual stories: “Cinnamon Shops”. For some reason the title of the English translation is usually rendered as “The Street of Crocodiles”, the name of another constituent story. Both stories are brilliant! “Cinnamon Shops” is a beautiful dream-like sequence. In it there are the eponymous shops, which incidentally don’t sell spices but are mysterious establishments that offer curiosities and books; they are called thus because of the dark panelling of their walls. “The Street of Crocodiles”, on the other hand, describes a part of town that’s “Pseudo-American” (Schulz’s expression, not mine!), lascivious, and superficial. It only exists in black-and-white and is described by the author as “half-baked and [of an] undecided reality”.
The translation into English is also brilliant. Celina Wieniewska did a sterling job, making everything sound and feel perfectly lucid and idiomatic. I don’t have any Polish but translating Bruno Schulz cannot be easy!
Verdict: a book unlike any other I have ever read: automatic 5 stars and promotion to my ‘all-time-favourites’ bookshelf. By the way: you can easily read this slim volume in a few hours; then cogitate its contents, which are biblical in proportion, for a few months!
March 31, 2017
Bruno Schulz, loner from Drogobych as he was named, in this collection of short stories, impressions actually, evokes that distant land called childhood.
At the centre of that created world is, quite patriarchal, figure of the father - unstuck from reality , absorbed in thoughts and deep in his eccentricities. Birds, mannequins and cockroaches gradually are occupying his mind. One by one , he shook off the bonds off association with human society.
In the background are the other people around the author : mother, dreamy and neglecting the house; a domestic help Adela, like a pagan goddess, rampant and emanating femininity; aunts and uncles and cousins. And the house itself, like a labyrinth with unknown number of rooms, where household, especially father is disappearing for whole weeks to emerge unexpectedly another day, cobwebbed and dusted.
At the forefront, however, is an unique and extremely dense language. The atmosphere is dreamy-like, the novel reads in just sensual way, you can feel it with your sight, taste and scent. Adela returned on luminous mornings, like Pomona from the fire of the enkindled day , tipping from her basket the colorful beauty of the sun : glistening wild cherries , full of water under their transparent skins, mysterious black cherries whose aroma surpassed that which would be realized in their taste, and apricots ,in whose golden pulp lay the core of the long afternoons.
Schulz captures our senses from the very first passage. Seemingly ordinary house under his pen populates with mythical creatures, animated things and humanized animals; wallpapers and candelabrums seem to live own life; mythologized reality, a rich, almost baroque vocabulary and unbridled imagination of the author, metaphors and ornamentation of the language are used here to describe the world which is going to pass.
But before that happens, before the winds of history wipe away a small Galician town, its houses and shops ,merchants and teachers , before they destroy the author, let him seduce us and invite to his world. Let’s immerse ourselves in lazy summer day of August when heat appears to dizzying us and, wandering around in the backstreets, set off to look for cinamonn shops.
April 15, 2021
This is an extraordinary work by a truly amazing writer. Bruno Schulz lived in Poland until he was killed by the Nazis (there are two different stories of how he died, one more 'romantic' than the other; no matter, he ended up with others in an unmarked grave). He published two major and amazing works, Cinnamon Shops also known as Street of Crocodiles, and The Sanitorium Under the Hourglass.
This is some of the most exuberant and unique prose you'll ever encounter. It's magical surrealism, untethered, buoyant. It's so unique I struggled with it for the first 94 pages feeling like I was missing something until aha! it came together for me. That is my brain on Schulz; your mileage will vary and you'll likely fall right into the book and not want to come out again. Once I realized what, how much Schulz did here I started again on the first page and took one of the most remarkable literary journeys of my life.
There are two translations. I learned that my GR friend Matthew Appleton, who recommended this book to me (can never thank you enough!) and all of the others whose reviews I savored read a different translation than I did. Mine, by Madeline Levine, is from 2018 and done in cooperation with Polish scholars and the few background materials that exist on Schulz. I won't go into it here but each has its beauty and assets. Levine's being newer and focused more on Schulz's literary techniques including alliteration is said to be definitive. From what I've read each is a win for different reasons and I would very much like to read the other sometime.
The edition I have includes the only other two stories that survive. There is talk he gave his work to someone and to this day there is someone searching but it's likely lost to posterity. In any case the two other stories seem like practice for two in the main works and are not as beautifully written.
The other editions are illustrated because he was a visual artist as well. This one isn't. At first I didn't even know he illustrated the work and did quite a bit more drawing, murals -- the writing is so remarkably visual, descriptive, ebullient. Everything in Cinnamon Shops and The Sanitorium Under the Hourglass everything is animate: pots and pans fly out of attics in the town and then the attics fly too. The lush fabrics in the father's store move in descriptions that have me resisting superlatives but really, this is so special. The father turns into a cockroach (Schulz translated Kafka into Polish), a crab, a stuffed condor; he is dead, alive, in-between. Birds take up residence in the apartment and take flight, the prose takes flight. There are themes and echoes, some of it seems so free of literary constraint but he was always completely in control. It's word-perfect. It's profound. I'm in awe of his work.
He must speak for himself now (through Madeline Levine). Some of it is so beautiful I cried. In this passage the protagonist is looking through his friend's stamp album. It's all he, or Schulz, would see of these places and it is so very -- so so very:
from Spring, part of The Sanitorium Under the Hourglass:
"In May, there were days that were pink like Egypt. In the market square radiance poured out, rippling, from every border. In the sky, the pile of summer clouds knelt, all fleecy, beneath fissures of radiance, volcanic, vividly outlined, and—Barbados, Labrador, Trinidad—everything passed into red as if seen through ruby-colored spectacles, and through those two, three pulses, through growing darkness, through the red eclipse of blood pounding against the head, the great corvette of Guyana sailed across the entire sky, exploding with all its sails. Bulging, it glided along, its canvas snorting, towed cumbersomely amid its extended lines and the clamor of the towboats, through commotions of seagulls and the red radiance of the sea. Then the immense, jumbled rigging of ropes, ladders, and poles rose up to the entire sky and expanded immensely in breadth and, booming on high with its unfurled canvas the manifold, many-storied aerial spectacle of sails, yards and clew lines opened out, while in the hatches small, agile Negro boys appeared for a moment and then scattered in that canvas labyrinth, disappearing among the signs and figures of the fantastic sky of the tropics.
"Then the scene changes, and in the sky, in the massifs of clouds, as many as three pink eclipses were coming to a climax at the same time, glowing lava was smoking, outlining with a luminous line the threatening contours of the clouds, and—Cuba, Haiti, Jamaica—the core of the world was moving into the depths, growing more and more vividly, making its way to the heart, and suddenly the pure essence of these days poured out: the murmuring oceanicity of the tropics, of archipelagic azures, of happy brooks and whirlpools, and equatorial salty monsoons. With the stamp album in my hand I read the spring. Was it not a great commentary of the times, a grammar book of its days and nights? That spring declined through all the Colombias, Costa Ricas, and Venezuelas, for what, in essence, are Mexico and Ecuador and Sierra Leone if not some kind of ingenious nostrum, some intensification of the taste of the world, some extreme, refined finality, a blind alley of aroma into which the world rushes in its quests, testing and practicing on every keyboard? The main thing, let us not forget—like Alexander the Great—is that no Mexico is the ultimate one, that it is a transitional point that the world passes by, that beyond every Mexico a new Mexico opens up, even more vivid, hypercolorful, and hyperaromatic."
This is some of the most exuberant and unique prose you'll ever encounter. It's magical surrealism, untethered, buoyant. It's so unique I struggled with it for the first 94 pages feeling like I was missing something until aha! it came together for me. That is my brain on Schulz; your mileage will vary and you'll likely fall right into the book and not want to come out again. Once I realized what, how much Schulz did here I started again on the first page and took one of the most remarkable literary journeys of my life.
There are two translations. I learned that my GR friend Matthew Appleton, who recommended this book to me (can never thank you enough!) and all of the others whose reviews I savored read a different translation than I did. Mine, by Madeline Levine, is from 2018 and done in cooperation with Polish scholars and the few background materials that exist on Schulz. I won't go into it here but each has its beauty and assets. Levine's being newer and focused more on Schulz's literary techniques including alliteration is said to be definitive. From what I've read each is a win for different reasons and I would very much like to read the other sometime.
The edition I have includes the only other two stories that survive. There is talk he gave his work to someone and to this day there is someone searching but it's likely lost to posterity. In any case the two other stories seem like practice for two in the main works and are not as beautifully written.
The other editions are illustrated because he was a visual artist as well. This one isn't. At first I didn't even know he illustrated the work and did quite a bit more drawing, murals -- the writing is so remarkably visual, descriptive, ebullient. Everything in Cinnamon Shops and The Sanitorium Under the Hourglass everything is animate: pots and pans fly out of attics in the town and then the attics fly too. The lush fabrics in the father's store move in descriptions that have me resisting superlatives but really, this is so special. The father turns into a cockroach (Schulz translated Kafka into Polish), a crab, a stuffed condor; he is dead, alive, in-between. Birds take up residence in the apartment and take flight, the prose takes flight. There are themes and echoes, some of it seems so free of literary constraint but he was always completely in control. It's word-perfect. It's profound. I'm in awe of his work.
He must speak for himself now (through Madeline Levine). Some of it is so beautiful I cried. In this passage the protagonist is looking through his friend's stamp album. It's all he, or Schulz, would see of these places and it is so very -- so so very:
from Spring, part of The Sanitorium Under the Hourglass:
"In May, there were days that were pink like Egypt. In the market square radiance poured out, rippling, from every border. In the sky, the pile of summer clouds knelt, all fleecy, beneath fissures of radiance, volcanic, vividly outlined, and—Barbados, Labrador, Trinidad—everything passed into red as if seen through ruby-colored spectacles, and through those two, three pulses, through growing darkness, through the red eclipse of blood pounding against the head, the great corvette of Guyana sailed across the entire sky, exploding with all its sails. Bulging, it glided along, its canvas snorting, towed cumbersomely amid its extended lines and the clamor of the towboats, through commotions of seagulls and the red radiance of the sea. Then the immense, jumbled rigging of ropes, ladders, and poles rose up to the entire sky and expanded immensely in breadth and, booming on high with its unfurled canvas the manifold, many-storied aerial spectacle of sails, yards and clew lines opened out, while in the hatches small, agile Negro boys appeared for a moment and then scattered in that canvas labyrinth, disappearing among the signs and figures of the fantastic sky of the tropics.
"Then the scene changes, and in the sky, in the massifs of clouds, as many as three pink eclipses were coming to a climax at the same time, glowing lava was smoking, outlining with a luminous line the threatening contours of the clouds, and—Cuba, Haiti, Jamaica—the core of the world was moving into the depths, growing more and more vividly, making its way to the heart, and suddenly the pure essence of these days poured out: the murmuring oceanicity of the tropics, of archipelagic azures, of happy brooks and whirlpools, and equatorial salty monsoons. With the stamp album in my hand I read the spring. Was it not a great commentary of the times, a grammar book of its days and nights? That spring declined through all the Colombias, Costa Ricas, and Venezuelas, for what, in essence, are Mexico and Ecuador and Sierra Leone if not some kind of ingenious nostrum, some intensification of the taste of the world, some extreme, refined finality, a blind alley of aroma into which the world rushes in its quests, testing and practicing on every keyboard? The main thing, let us not forget—like Alexander the Great—is that no Mexico is the ultimate one, that it is a transitional point that the world passes by, that beyond every Mexico a new Mexico opens up, even more vivid, hypercolorful, and hyperaromatic."
January 5, 2019
Bruno Schulz had an imagination like no one else. His metaphors, similes, and personifications whirl the reader through a cosmos as vivid and surreal as Van Gogh’s “Starry Night.” His characters prophesy like the enigmatic beings that inhabit the pages of William Blake. At once fiction and nonfiction, prose and poetry, memory and dream, The Street of Crocodiles defies categorization.
Schulz is sometimes compared to Kafka, but he should not be. He is not Kafkaesque. The world of Kafka is a nightmare world ~ a nightmare from which one cannot awaken. The world of Schulz is the real world touched by the fantastic, the real world as perceived in a dream. Nor is this magical realism, for elements of fantasy do not truly invade the real world. It is only the narrator’s perceptions which import the fantastic or the grotesque into the real.
The distortions of reality—of time and space—are distortions imposed by the mind of the observer. And the observer is the mythopoeic visionary Bruno Schulz, a man whose dream world is superimposed upon the real one, a man who is at home with the visions of prophets and madmen, a man who never quite lost the childhood ability to see behind the curtain of the mundane, to glimpse the cosmic wonders through which the mass of men and women sleepwalk. Schulz is like one who awakens in a dream.
The following passages highlight three dream elements in The Street of Crocodiles. First, there is spatial distortion.
“I stepped into a winter night bright from the illuminations of the sky. It was one of those clear nights when the starry firmament is so wide and spreads so far that it seems to be divided and broken up into a mass of separate skies, sufficient for a whole month of winter nights and providing silver and painted globes to cover all the nightly phenomena, adventures, occurrences and carnivals.
It is exceedingly thoughtless to send a young boy out on an urgent and important errand into a night like that because in its semiobscurity the streets multiply, becoming confused and interchanged. There open up, deep inside a city, reflected streets, streets which are doubles, make-believe streets. One’s imagination, bewitched and misled, creates illusory maps of the apparently familiar districts, maps in which the streets have their proper places and usual names but are provided with new and fictitious configurations by the inexhaustible inventiveness of the night...” (87-88).
Second, there is temporal distortion.
“Everyone knows that in a run of normal uneventful years that great eccentric, Time, begets sometimes other years, different, prodigal years which—like a sixth, smallest toe—grow a thirteenth freak month.
We use the word ‘freak’ deliberately, because the thirteenth month only rarely reaches maturity, and like a child conceived late in its mother’s life, it lags behind in growth; it is a hunchback month, a half-witted shoot, more tentative than real.
What is at fault is the senile intemperance of the summer, its lustful and belated spurt of vitality. It sometimes happens that August has passed, and yet the old thick trunk of summer continues by force of habit to produce and from its moldered wood grows those crab-days, weed-days, sterile and stupid, added as an afterthought; stunted, empty, useless days –white days, permanently astonished and quite unnecessary. They sprout, irregular and uneven, formless and joined like the fingers of a monster's hand, stumps folded into a fist.
There are people who liken these days to an apocrypha, put secretly between the chapters of the great book of the year; to palimpsests, covertly included between its pages; to those white, unprinted sheets on which eyes, replete with reading and the remembered shapes of words, can imagine colors and pictures, which gradually become paler and paler from the blankness of the pages, or can rest on their neutrality before continuing the quest for new adventures in new chapters” (125-126).
And last, there is the uncanny ~ the revelation of an occult world that coexists with the real world, a world hidden from all but the few whose peculiar nature allows them to discover it.
“... at that late hour the strange and most attractive shops were sometimes open, the shops which on ordinary days one tended to overlook. I used to call them cinnamon shops because of the dark paneling of their walls.
These truly noble shops, open late at night, have always been the objects of my ardent interest. Dimly lit, their dark and solemn interiors were redolent of the smell of paint, varnish and incense; of the aroma of distant countries and rare commodities. You could find in them Bengal lights, magic boxes, the stamps of long-forgotten countries, Chinese decals, indigo, calaphony from Malabar, the eggs of exotic insects, parrots, toucans, live salamanders and basilisks, mandrake roots, mechanical toys from Nuremberg, homunculi in jars, microscopes, binoculars and most especially strange and rare books, old folio volumes full of astonishing engravings and amazing stories.
I remember those old dignified merchants who served their customers with downcast eyes, in discreet silence, and who were full of wisdom and tolerance for their customers’ most secret whims. But most of all, I remember a bookshop in which I once glanced at some rare and forbidden pamphlets, the publications of secret societies lifting the veil on tantalizing and unknown mysteries” (89).
Familiar streets transformed into a marvelous labyrinth, time extending beyond its natural limits, an esoteric ‘other world’ concealed in the midst of the ordinary and everyday ~ this is the dreamy Drohobych of Schulz’s imagination, a mythic city described in rich prose that alternately drips with the golden juices of ripe fruit or scuttles mechanically on spidery legs or entices the mind with cryptic messages of mystical import.
The Street of Crocodiles is a weird and wondrous book. When Schulz was murdered at the age of fifty, shot by a Nazi soldier, the world lost a truly unique artist.
Schulz is sometimes compared to Kafka, but he should not be. He is not Kafkaesque. The world of Kafka is a nightmare world ~ a nightmare from which one cannot awaken. The world of Schulz is the real world touched by the fantastic, the real world as perceived in a dream. Nor is this magical realism, for elements of fantasy do not truly invade the real world. It is only the narrator’s perceptions which import the fantastic or the grotesque into the real.
The distortions of reality—of time and space—are distortions imposed by the mind of the observer. And the observer is the mythopoeic visionary Bruno Schulz, a man whose dream world is superimposed upon the real one, a man who is at home with the visions of prophets and madmen, a man who never quite lost the childhood ability to see behind the curtain of the mundane, to glimpse the cosmic wonders through which the mass of men and women sleepwalk. Schulz is like one who awakens in a dream.
The following passages highlight three dream elements in The Street of Crocodiles. First, there is spatial distortion.
“I stepped into a winter night bright from the illuminations of the sky. It was one of those clear nights when the starry firmament is so wide and spreads so far that it seems to be divided and broken up into a mass of separate skies, sufficient for a whole month of winter nights and providing silver and painted globes to cover all the nightly phenomena, adventures, occurrences and carnivals.
It is exceedingly thoughtless to send a young boy out on an urgent and important errand into a night like that because in its semiobscurity the streets multiply, becoming confused and interchanged. There open up, deep inside a city, reflected streets, streets which are doubles, make-believe streets. One’s imagination, bewitched and misled, creates illusory maps of the apparently familiar districts, maps in which the streets have their proper places and usual names but are provided with new and fictitious configurations by the inexhaustible inventiveness of the night...” (87-88).
Second, there is temporal distortion.
“Everyone knows that in a run of normal uneventful years that great eccentric, Time, begets sometimes other years, different, prodigal years which—like a sixth, smallest toe—grow a thirteenth freak month.
We use the word ‘freak’ deliberately, because the thirteenth month only rarely reaches maturity, and like a child conceived late in its mother’s life, it lags behind in growth; it is a hunchback month, a half-witted shoot, more tentative than real.
What is at fault is the senile intemperance of the summer, its lustful and belated spurt of vitality. It sometimes happens that August has passed, and yet the old thick trunk of summer continues by force of habit to produce and from its moldered wood grows those crab-days, weed-days, sterile and stupid, added as an afterthought; stunted, empty, useless days –white days, permanently astonished and quite unnecessary. They sprout, irregular and uneven, formless and joined like the fingers of a monster's hand, stumps folded into a fist.
There are people who liken these days to an apocrypha, put secretly between the chapters of the great book of the year; to palimpsests, covertly included between its pages; to those white, unprinted sheets on which eyes, replete with reading and the remembered shapes of words, can imagine colors and pictures, which gradually become paler and paler from the blankness of the pages, or can rest on their neutrality before continuing the quest for new adventures in new chapters” (125-126).
And last, there is the uncanny ~ the revelation of an occult world that coexists with the real world, a world hidden from all but the few whose peculiar nature allows them to discover it.
“... at that late hour the strange and most attractive shops were sometimes open, the shops which on ordinary days one tended to overlook. I used to call them cinnamon shops because of the dark paneling of their walls.
These truly noble shops, open late at night, have always been the objects of my ardent interest. Dimly lit, their dark and solemn interiors were redolent of the smell of paint, varnish and incense; of the aroma of distant countries and rare commodities. You could find in them Bengal lights, magic boxes, the stamps of long-forgotten countries, Chinese decals, indigo, calaphony from Malabar, the eggs of exotic insects, parrots, toucans, live salamanders and basilisks, mandrake roots, mechanical toys from Nuremberg, homunculi in jars, microscopes, binoculars and most especially strange and rare books, old folio volumes full of astonishing engravings and amazing stories.
I remember those old dignified merchants who served their customers with downcast eyes, in discreet silence, and who were full of wisdom and tolerance for their customers’ most secret whims. But most of all, I remember a bookshop in which I once glanced at some rare and forbidden pamphlets, the publications of secret societies lifting the veil on tantalizing and unknown mysteries” (89).
Familiar streets transformed into a marvelous labyrinth, time extending beyond its natural limits, an esoteric ‘other world’ concealed in the midst of the ordinary and everyday ~ this is the dreamy Drohobych of Schulz’s imagination, a mythic city described in rich prose that alternately drips with the golden juices of ripe fruit or scuttles mechanically on spidery legs or entices the mind with cryptic messages of mystical import.
The Street of Crocodiles is a weird and wondrous book. When Schulz was murdered at the age of fifty, shot by a Nazi soldier, the world lost a truly unique artist.
December 30, 2014
Preface
This volume contains two collections of short stories and three additional stories that were originally published with Schulz's letters, drawings and miscellaneous prose.
I'll review each of the collections separately under their GR titles.
After only two or three stories, I started having really vivid responses, which I turned into a story. I normally place any creative responses to a book at the end of my more analytical review. However, this time, I'll reverse the order, so that the review doesn't pre-empt what I was trying to achieve with the story.
The Mannequin in the House
[Inspired by the Life and Works of Bruno Schulz]
My grandfather and I were the first to awake that morning.
When I came down from my room, he was already in the study, reading the arts pages of the weekend newspaper. My family were tailors, but my grandfather loved to read. He usually read the news and politics on Saturday, and the arts pages on Sunday, when he had more time.
I hadn't meant to wake up that early. I quickly became restless. It wasn't light yet, and my grandfather had only turned on a reading light next to his chair. He was always conscious of conserving energy and money. His thrift had served him and our family well, I suppose.
Grandfather saw that I was fidgety, and went into the kitchen. He gave me some coins from the old money tin, and suggested I go to the bakery and buy some pastries for breakfast. When I closed the front door behind me, it was already starting to get light. I remember the streetlights turning off as I rounded the corner. Then I noticed a lot of vehicles and men in uniform. I tried not to look at them. I don't know how closely they looked at me, but they didn't try to stop me.
By the time I returned to the corner with our pastries, they had blocked the street. There were fire engines at the corner, but they weren't letting them in. The firemen were pointing down the street, agitated, but the men in uniform were holding them back. When I got close enough to look down our street, I could see that four houses on our side of the street were on fire. They were all in the same block, and one of them belonged to our family. I strained to hear anything above the roar of the fire. I thought I heard screams, but nobody emerged from any of the buildings. A few times, I thought I heard gunshots.
I didn't know what to do. Nobody who passed me in the street looked me in the eye. It was as if I wasn't there, as if I too must have died in the fire.
I decided to walk to my uncle's home. It was a kilometre away.
When I arrived there, he was already in his car with my aunt and my two cousins.
"What's happening?" I asked.
"They're coming for us. We have to leave immediately, or they will kill us, too."
They had a few possessions in the car with them, but not many.
We had to go near our home to get out of the city. I asked if I could have a look at it one last time. My aunt and uncle discussed the risks on the way there. As we got near the corner, I realised that the men in uniform were nowhere to be seen. The street was empty, apart from the fire engines. I was allowed to walk down to the remains of our home with my oldest cousin, Rudy.
The houses had been three storeys high, and each of them had fallen inwards. Even before I thought about everything my family had lost, including their lives, I can still remember that my first reaction was how little is left of a home when it is destroyed by fire. The pile of rubble didn't even come up to my head.
Rudy started to tug at my hand, and I realised that we had to go, before it was too late. I took one last look, and it was then that I saw one of grandfather's mannequins. Somehow it didn't seem to have been damaged at all. I looked at it, and it looked at me, and we said our goodbyes, for the time being.
I think they had intended to clear the whole neighbourhood, and rebuild new residences there, but when I returned eighteen months later after the war had ended, nothing had changed. Even the mannequin was poking out of the top of the rubble, looking at me. I went up to it, lifted it upright, and brushed off the ash and dust. It now stood proud above the rubble.
I assume this was the moment it resumed its work for my family.
The men in uniform had never made their way to my aunt and uncle's home, and I returned there with them. Each day, they let me visit our home. I think they assumed that I would one day put it behind me. They were as surprised as I was when I told them what had happened the following days. Each day I returned, a storey of our home seem to be re-constructed, by itself, where previously there had only been rubble.
By the third day, it seemed to be complete, so for the first time, I entered our home, and discovered that it was exactly as I had left it. It was as if this pile of rubble, this empty space, had memorised our home, and given the opportunity, it had rebuilt it from memory.
But that is only the first part of my story.
I moved back into my room. Rudy was allowed to join me as company. But I always had a feeling that the house was watching us. Now that it existed, it was trying to reconstruct its life, too.
One Saturday morning, I came downstairs, went to the bakery, and when I returned, I noticed somebody sitting in the study with a newspaper. It was my grandfather. He asked whether I had got him his usual rugelach. I'm sure that I had only ordered enough pastries for Rudy and me, but when I looked into the paper bag, I realised I had enough food for the entire family. I assembled it all on a plate on the dining table.
Then, as I waited, one by one, my whole family descended from above and said hello, as if nothing had happened.
I was only fourteen, but I noticed that everybody looked to me for guidance. I didn't know why or what for. Soon I seem to have re-established all of our family routines, because it was expected of me. One that mattered to all of us was evening supper. No matter who had been home for dinner, we all gathered for an hour or so before going to bed. It was when we listened to everybody's stories about what they had done that day or in the past.
The first evening, my grandfather asked, "Can you remember one of my stories?" Well, of course I could, I had sat in his lap for years, memorising his stories as if, one day, when I had grandchildren, they might seem like my stories.
One by one, over the next few weeks, I told everybody's stories. Initially, they just nodded in agreement. Occasionally, somebody else said, "That's a good one."
Then one day, at supper, nobody looked at me with their usual expectation. Instead, grandfather started by telling a story, then my father said, "Funny, that reminds me," and he told one of his stories.
After a while, as I had become accustomed to, I said, "OK, it's time we all went off to bed."
Everybody looked at me with bemusement. I was, after all, the youngest in the room. Then they laughed. I looked over to the corner of the dining room, and noticed that even the mannequin was laughing.
To this day, we don't go to bed, until each of us has told one of our stories.
Darkness and Light
I first became aware of Bruno Schulz, when I read one of my favourite novels, Nicole Krauss' "The History of Love", which I highly recommend.
By the time I got around to reading Schulz's book, I was aware that its original Polish title had been "Cinnamon Shops". I didn't know much else about the subject matter of the book.
For me, both alternative titles summon up exotic images of Jewish life between the wars. I expected the stories to flesh out these images. I had no idea how thoroughly and profoundly they would do so, but not in the manner I had anticipated.
There is a lot of darkness and light in the collection.
The darkness describes the interior of the narrator's second-floor apartment. The light describes the sun-lit world outside, often described as luminous, that offers up its fruit, vegetables, meat and seafood for consumption. People and music move between these worlds. The apartment can become light, just by pulling the curtains.
Although the darkness and light is grounded in reality, there is a sense in which it is metaphorical, even metaphysical, and in this way it seems to be prescient of the horror of the Holocaust.
Cinnamon Shops
I had assumed that the cinnamon shops would describe the outlets of "truly noble" merchants from which the characters would purchase their groceries (and books). They do, but the reason for this title is not so much the exotic spices that are on sale, or their smell, but the colour of the timber panelling on the walls. Many of my favourite European-style restaurants and cafes share this cinnamon appearance. It will now have far greater significance for me.
These buildings are not brand new. They are old, they carry history on their shoulders and in their bones. This is Aunt Agatha's home, for example:
"In the gloom of the hall, with its old lithographs, rotten with mildew and blind with age, we rediscovered a well-known smell. In that old familiar smell was contained a marvellously simple synthesis of the life of those people, the distillation of their race, the quality of their blood, and the secret of their fate, imperceptibly mixed day by day with the passage of their own, private time."
The buildings don't just reflect and preserve Jewish culture and tradition, they keep it alive, apparently both metaphorically and literally.
Still, like all matter, they form part of a process of gradual decline and decay.
The paragraph continues:
"The old, wise door, the silent witness of the entries and exits of mother, daughters, sons, whose dark sighs accompanied the comings and goings of those people, now opened noiselessly like the door of a wardrobe, and we stepped into their life."
I was starting to get the impression that the narrator's world observes and memorises us, that it has human traits.
So Very Remote
Like the building, the narrator's eccentric father, Jacob, is "slowly fading, wilting before our eyes."
His personality is disintegrating into "a number of opposing and quarrelling selves [which] dissolved into curses, execrations, maledictions, and insults [after which came] a period of appeasement, of an interior calm, a blessed serenity of spirit."
Jacob resides on the borderline between immobility and animation. He surrounds himself with old junk and oddities. He lives deep inside his own imagination, "almost completely rid of bodily needs...":
"We did not count him as one of us anymore, so very remote had he become from everything that was human and real. Knot by knot, he loosened himself from us; point by point, he gave up the ties joining him to the human community...[All that remained of him was] the small shroud of his body and the handful of nonsensical oddities."
Jacob is almost metamorphosing into the other world of buildings.
The Metaphysical Conjurer
The building is almost human, while Jacob has almost become part of the furniture. The concept of this metamorphosis might sound Kafkaesque, but its design and application is unique to Schulz.
Still, within the enchantment of his imagination, Jacob has a kingdom and a throne, that together constitute a sovereign magic, although this too is bound to be taken away from him.
Jacob is a "metaphysical conjurer", opposed to the ordinary, the uniform, the unimaginative, the dull, the conformist, the compliant, the complicit:
"Only now do I understand the lonely hero who alone had waged war against the fathomless, elemental boredom that strangled the city. Without any support, without recognition on our part, that strangest of men was defending the lost cause of poetry. He was like a magic mill..."
The life of the imagination battles against both the uniform and uniforms.
The Humus of Memories
Jacob marvels at how beautiful and simple life is:
"The newly awakened joy of life transformed every sensation into a great joke, into gaiety...an attempt to express the incredible wonder of that capital enterprise, life, so full of unexpected encounters, pleasures, and thrills."
In "Tailors' Dummies", paradoxically, humans have become like automatons, while the mannequins have acquired a pseudo-life, their source of sustenance "old apartments saturated with the emanations of numerous existences and events; used-up atmospheres, rich in the humus of memories, of nostalgia, and of sterile boredom."
At a time in history when we would hope that mankind would be most vital, it is actually in retreat.
Apocrypha and Palimpsests
In the absence of any other guide, Jacob is mapping the psyche of the Street of Crocodiles, this other world "of which almost nothing is known". It proves to be as complicated and mortal as any human being:
"[Apartments like this are] unstable, degenerate, and receptive to abnormal temptations: it is then that on this sick, tired, and wasted soil colourful and exuberant mildew can flourish in a fantastic growth, like a beautiful rash."
Still, for all this transgression, the outside world impinges on the Street of Crocodiles:
"The women of the Street of Crocodiles are depraved to only a modest extent, stifled by thick layers of moral prejudice and ordinary banality. In that city of cheap human material, no instincts can flourish, no dark and unusual passions can be aroused."
In Freudian terms, the outside world is still a place where the Id is oppressed by the Super-Ego.
The Street of Crocodiles is some sort of reprieve, even if it must be a product of the imagination:
"The Street of Crocodiles was a concession of our city to modernity and metropolitan corruption. Obviously, we were unable to afford anything better than a paper imitation, a montage of illustrations cut out from last year's moldering newspapers."
The Indispensable Minimum
Jacob has but one complaint about creation. He calls for"Less matter, more form!"
He speculates that there might be too much matter and complexity. This excess is wasted. It has ceased to be beautiful. It has become ugly.
He decides to experiment on his brother. He commits to "a gradual shedding of all his characteristics in order to lay bare his deepest self...[He] reduced Uncle to the indispensable minimum, by removing from him one by one all of the inessentials...
"Uncle functioned excellently. There was no instance of his refusal to obey. Having discarded his complicated personality, in which at one time he had lost himself, he found at last the purity of a uniform and straightforward guiding principle to which he was subjected from now on.
"At the cost of his complexity, which he could manage only with difficulty, he had now achieved a simple problem-free immortality."
The Ultrabarrel of Myth
Was Uncle happy? Not really:
"A question like this makes sense only when applied to creatures who are rich in alternative possibilities...Uncle Edward had no alternatives; the dichotomy 'happy/unhappy' did not exist for him because he had become completely integrated."
Ultimately, Jacob realises that he has been working against an eternal, cosmic order:
"He understood that he had gone too far, and put a rein on the flight of his fancies...The enormous pathos of all these scenes proved that we had removed the bottom of the eternal barrel of memories, of an ultrabarrel of myth, and had broken into a prehuman night of untamed elements, of incoherent anamnesis, and could not hold the swelling flood."
Perhaps both chaos and complexity are vital aspects of life.
Jacob's Cosmology
Jacob's theories take us through a cosmological journey, from the atom to the universe.
Mankind fits somewhere in between.
The wonder of this collection of stories is that it paints a picture of people in real life, while simultaneously speculating on their position in the cosmos.
At the same time, it seems to anticipate the conflict between the Jewish people and Nazism that would lead to the Holocaust.
There is a sense in which Jewish culture already seemed to be under threat by the conformism and intolerance of Western culture.
Jacob uses his imagination to combat this threat. This was a difficult enough task. However, nobody could have anticipated how difficult the task of combatting Nazism would be.
Bruno Schulz didn't survive the combat. He died for the most banal of reasons. They're detailed in the Introduction.
We're incredibly fortunate that these stories survived and that they contribute to our understanding of the Holocaust and mankind.
In a way, the survival of these stories helps us to deal with the Holocaust.
However, the Introduction informs us that, just as Bruno Schulz died in the Holocaust, so too did his novel called "The Messiah".
The tragedy is that a book can only work its magic, if it survives the calamity of its era.
Whatever the tragedy of losing both the author and his novel, it makes us doubly fortunate that we still have "The Street of Crocodiles".
This volume contains two collections of short stories and three additional stories that were originally published with Schulz's letters, drawings and miscellaneous prose.
I'll review each of the collections separately under their GR titles.
After only two or three stories, I started having really vivid responses, which I turned into a story. I normally place any creative responses to a book at the end of my more analytical review. However, this time, I'll reverse the order, so that the review doesn't pre-empt what I was trying to achieve with the story.
The Mannequin in the House
[Inspired by the Life and Works of Bruno Schulz]
My grandfather and I were the first to awake that morning.
When I came down from my room, he was already in the study, reading the arts pages of the weekend newspaper. My family were tailors, but my grandfather loved to read. He usually read the news and politics on Saturday, and the arts pages on Sunday, when he had more time.
I hadn't meant to wake up that early. I quickly became restless. It wasn't light yet, and my grandfather had only turned on a reading light next to his chair. He was always conscious of conserving energy and money. His thrift had served him and our family well, I suppose.
Grandfather saw that I was fidgety, and went into the kitchen. He gave me some coins from the old money tin, and suggested I go to the bakery and buy some pastries for breakfast. When I closed the front door behind me, it was already starting to get light. I remember the streetlights turning off as I rounded the corner. Then I noticed a lot of vehicles and men in uniform. I tried not to look at them. I don't know how closely they looked at me, but they didn't try to stop me.
By the time I returned to the corner with our pastries, they had blocked the street. There were fire engines at the corner, but they weren't letting them in. The firemen were pointing down the street, agitated, but the men in uniform were holding them back. When I got close enough to look down our street, I could see that four houses on our side of the street were on fire. They were all in the same block, and one of them belonged to our family. I strained to hear anything above the roar of the fire. I thought I heard screams, but nobody emerged from any of the buildings. A few times, I thought I heard gunshots.
I didn't know what to do. Nobody who passed me in the street looked me in the eye. It was as if I wasn't there, as if I too must have died in the fire.
I decided to walk to my uncle's home. It was a kilometre away.
When I arrived there, he was already in his car with my aunt and my two cousins.
"What's happening?" I asked.
"They're coming for us. We have to leave immediately, or they will kill us, too."
They had a few possessions in the car with them, but not many.
We had to go near our home to get out of the city. I asked if I could have a look at it one last time. My aunt and uncle discussed the risks on the way there. As we got near the corner, I realised that the men in uniform were nowhere to be seen. The street was empty, apart from the fire engines. I was allowed to walk down to the remains of our home with my oldest cousin, Rudy.
The houses had been three storeys high, and each of them had fallen inwards. Even before I thought about everything my family had lost, including their lives, I can still remember that my first reaction was how little is left of a home when it is destroyed by fire. The pile of rubble didn't even come up to my head.
Rudy started to tug at my hand, and I realised that we had to go, before it was too late. I took one last look, and it was then that I saw one of grandfather's mannequins. Somehow it didn't seem to have been damaged at all. I looked at it, and it looked at me, and we said our goodbyes, for the time being.
I think they had intended to clear the whole neighbourhood, and rebuild new residences there, but when I returned eighteen months later after the war had ended, nothing had changed. Even the mannequin was poking out of the top of the rubble, looking at me. I went up to it, lifted it upright, and brushed off the ash and dust. It now stood proud above the rubble.
I assume this was the moment it resumed its work for my family.
The men in uniform had never made their way to my aunt and uncle's home, and I returned there with them. Each day, they let me visit our home. I think they assumed that I would one day put it behind me. They were as surprised as I was when I told them what had happened the following days. Each day I returned, a storey of our home seem to be re-constructed, by itself, where previously there had only been rubble.
By the third day, it seemed to be complete, so for the first time, I entered our home, and discovered that it was exactly as I had left it. It was as if this pile of rubble, this empty space, had memorised our home, and given the opportunity, it had rebuilt it from memory.
But that is only the first part of my story.
I moved back into my room. Rudy was allowed to join me as company. But I always had a feeling that the house was watching us. Now that it existed, it was trying to reconstruct its life, too.
One Saturday morning, I came downstairs, went to the bakery, and when I returned, I noticed somebody sitting in the study with a newspaper. It was my grandfather. He asked whether I had got him his usual rugelach. I'm sure that I had only ordered enough pastries for Rudy and me, but when I looked into the paper bag, I realised I had enough food for the entire family. I assembled it all on a plate on the dining table.
Then, as I waited, one by one, my whole family descended from above and said hello, as if nothing had happened.
I was only fourteen, but I noticed that everybody looked to me for guidance. I didn't know why or what for. Soon I seem to have re-established all of our family routines, because it was expected of me. One that mattered to all of us was evening supper. No matter who had been home for dinner, we all gathered for an hour or so before going to bed. It was when we listened to everybody's stories about what they had done that day or in the past.
The first evening, my grandfather asked, "Can you remember one of my stories?" Well, of course I could, I had sat in his lap for years, memorising his stories as if, one day, when I had grandchildren, they might seem like my stories.
One by one, over the next few weeks, I told everybody's stories. Initially, they just nodded in agreement. Occasionally, somebody else said, "That's a good one."
Then one day, at supper, nobody looked at me with their usual expectation. Instead, grandfather started by telling a story, then my father said, "Funny, that reminds me," and he told one of his stories.
After a while, as I had become accustomed to, I said, "OK, it's time we all went off to bed."
Everybody looked at me with bemusement. I was, after all, the youngest in the room. Then they laughed. I looked over to the corner of the dining room, and noticed that even the mannequin was laughing.
To this day, we don't go to bed, until each of us has told one of our stories.
Darkness and Light
I first became aware of Bruno Schulz, when I read one of my favourite novels, Nicole Krauss' "The History of Love", which I highly recommend.
By the time I got around to reading Schulz's book, I was aware that its original Polish title had been "Cinnamon Shops". I didn't know much else about the subject matter of the book.
For me, both alternative titles summon up exotic images of Jewish life between the wars. I expected the stories to flesh out these images. I had no idea how thoroughly and profoundly they would do so, but not in the manner I had anticipated.
There is a lot of darkness and light in the collection.
The darkness describes the interior of the narrator's second-floor apartment. The light describes the sun-lit world outside, often described as luminous, that offers up its fruit, vegetables, meat and seafood for consumption. People and music move between these worlds. The apartment can become light, just by pulling the curtains.
Although the darkness and light is grounded in reality, there is a sense in which it is metaphorical, even metaphysical, and in this way it seems to be prescient of the horror of the Holocaust.
Cinnamon Shops
I had assumed that the cinnamon shops would describe the outlets of "truly noble" merchants from which the characters would purchase their groceries (and books). They do, but the reason for this title is not so much the exotic spices that are on sale, or their smell, but the colour of the timber panelling on the walls. Many of my favourite European-style restaurants and cafes share this cinnamon appearance. It will now have far greater significance for me.
These buildings are not brand new. They are old, they carry history on their shoulders and in their bones. This is Aunt Agatha's home, for example:
"In the gloom of the hall, with its old lithographs, rotten with mildew and blind with age, we rediscovered a well-known smell. In that old familiar smell was contained a marvellously simple synthesis of the life of those people, the distillation of their race, the quality of their blood, and the secret of their fate, imperceptibly mixed day by day with the passage of their own, private time."
The buildings don't just reflect and preserve Jewish culture and tradition, they keep it alive, apparently both metaphorically and literally.
Still, like all matter, they form part of a process of gradual decline and decay.
The paragraph continues:
"The old, wise door, the silent witness of the entries and exits of mother, daughters, sons, whose dark sighs accompanied the comings and goings of those people, now opened noiselessly like the door of a wardrobe, and we stepped into their life."
I was starting to get the impression that the narrator's world observes and memorises us, that it has human traits.
So Very Remote
Like the building, the narrator's eccentric father, Jacob, is "slowly fading, wilting before our eyes."
His personality is disintegrating into "a number of opposing and quarrelling selves [which] dissolved into curses, execrations, maledictions, and insults [after which came] a period of appeasement, of an interior calm, a blessed serenity of spirit."
Jacob resides on the borderline between immobility and animation. He surrounds himself with old junk and oddities. He lives deep inside his own imagination, "almost completely rid of bodily needs...":
"We did not count him as one of us anymore, so very remote had he become from everything that was human and real. Knot by knot, he loosened himself from us; point by point, he gave up the ties joining him to the human community...[All that remained of him was] the small shroud of his body and the handful of nonsensical oddities."
Jacob is almost metamorphosing into the other world of buildings.
The Metaphysical Conjurer
The building is almost human, while Jacob has almost become part of the furniture. The concept of this metamorphosis might sound Kafkaesque, but its design and application is unique to Schulz.
Still, within the enchantment of his imagination, Jacob has a kingdom and a throne, that together constitute a sovereign magic, although this too is bound to be taken away from him.
Jacob is a "metaphysical conjurer", opposed to the ordinary, the uniform, the unimaginative, the dull, the conformist, the compliant, the complicit:
"Only now do I understand the lonely hero who alone had waged war against the fathomless, elemental boredom that strangled the city. Without any support, without recognition on our part, that strangest of men was defending the lost cause of poetry. He was like a magic mill..."
The life of the imagination battles against both the uniform and uniforms.
The Humus of Memories
Jacob marvels at how beautiful and simple life is:
"The newly awakened joy of life transformed every sensation into a great joke, into gaiety...an attempt to express the incredible wonder of that capital enterprise, life, so full of unexpected encounters, pleasures, and thrills."
In "Tailors' Dummies", paradoxically, humans have become like automatons, while the mannequins have acquired a pseudo-life, their source of sustenance "old apartments saturated with the emanations of numerous existences and events; used-up atmospheres, rich in the humus of memories, of nostalgia, and of sterile boredom."
At a time in history when we would hope that mankind would be most vital, it is actually in retreat.
Apocrypha and Palimpsests
In the absence of any other guide, Jacob is mapping the psyche of the Street of Crocodiles, this other world "of which almost nothing is known". It proves to be as complicated and mortal as any human being:
"[Apartments like this are] unstable, degenerate, and receptive to abnormal temptations: it is then that on this sick, tired, and wasted soil colourful and exuberant mildew can flourish in a fantastic growth, like a beautiful rash."
Still, for all this transgression, the outside world impinges on the Street of Crocodiles:
"The women of the Street of Crocodiles are depraved to only a modest extent, stifled by thick layers of moral prejudice and ordinary banality. In that city of cheap human material, no instincts can flourish, no dark and unusual passions can be aroused."
In Freudian terms, the outside world is still a place where the Id is oppressed by the Super-Ego.
The Street of Crocodiles is some sort of reprieve, even if it must be a product of the imagination:
"The Street of Crocodiles was a concession of our city to modernity and metropolitan corruption. Obviously, we were unable to afford anything better than a paper imitation, a montage of illustrations cut out from last year's moldering newspapers."
The Indispensable Minimum
Jacob has but one complaint about creation. He calls for"Less matter, more form!"
He speculates that there might be too much matter and complexity. This excess is wasted. It has ceased to be beautiful. It has become ugly.
He decides to experiment on his brother. He commits to "a gradual shedding of all his characteristics in order to lay bare his deepest self...[He] reduced Uncle to the indispensable minimum, by removing from him one by one all of the inessentials...
"Uncle functioned excellently. There was no instance of his refusal to obey. Having discarded his complicated personality, in which at one time he had lost himself, he found at last the purity of a uniform and straightforward guiding principle to which he was subjected from now on.
"At the cost of his complexity, which he could manage only with difficulty, he had now achieved a simple problem-free immortality."
The Ultrabarrel of Myth
Was Uncle happy? Not really:
"A question like this makes sense only when applied to creatures who are rich in alternative possibilities...Uncle Edward had no alternatives; the dichotomy 'happy/unhappy' did not exist for him because he had become completely integrated."
Ultimately, Jacob realises that he has been working against an eternal, cosmic order:
"He understood that he had gone too far, and put a rein on the flight of his fancies...The enormous pathos of all these scenes proved that we had removed the bottom of the eternal barrel of memories, of an ultrabarrel of myth, and had broken into a prehuman night of untamed elements, of incoherent anamnesis, and could not hold the swelling flood."
Perhaps both chaos and complexity are vital aspects of life.
Jacob's Cosmology
Jacob's theories take us through a cosmological journey, from the atom to the universe.
Mankind fits somewhere in between.
The wonder of this collection of stories is that it paints a picture of people in real life, while simultaneously speculating on their position in the cosmos.
At the same time, it seems to anticipate the conflict between the Jewish people and Nazism that would lead to the Holocaust.
There is a sense in which Jewish culture already seemed to be under threat by the conformism and intolerance of Western culture.
Jacob uses his imagination to combat this threat. This was a difficult enough task. However, nobody could have anticipated how difficult the task of combatting Nazism would be.
Bruno Schulz didn't survive the combat. He died for the most banal of reasons. They're detailed in the Introduction.
We're incredibly fortunate that these stories survived and that they contribute to our understanding of the Holocaust and mankind.
In a way, the survival of these stories helps us to deal with the Holocaust.
However, the Introduction informs us that, just as Bruno Schulz died in the Holocaust, so too did his novel called "The Messiah".
The tragedy is that a book can only work its magic, if it survives the calamity of its era.
Whatever the tragedy of losing both the author and his novel, it makes us doubly fortunate that we still have "The Street of Crocodiles".
June 29, 2018
Dili, naifliği ve hikayesi ile mest etti beni. Arka kapakta yazan lehlerin kafkası vurgusuna takılmayın ama Prosut' la akraba olması olması şaşırtmazdı beni. Youtube'da diyaloglar başlığı ile aratırsanız karşınıza 1 saat 20 dakikalık bir video çıkacak. Kitabı okuyun, videoyu izleyin ve edebiyatın gücü karşısısında mest olun.
July 13, 2012
My father survived World War II hiding in a bunker under the town of Drohobych, so I feel eerily connected to this man and his work.
It would be fair to call Bruno Schulz Poland's greatest twentieth century writer. This collection of stories changes the very definition of what a short story should be. There is a beginning, a middle, and an end, yes, but the writing is best described as delirious, hypnotic, dreamlike. You don't read Schulz for the plot; you read for the prose, the intensely sensual visuals, the way the words unfurl like the leaves of a magical vine. Inanimate objects struggle to come to life. Secret rooms grow strange, trapped gardens. A boy blows away with a gust of wind. His father conjures a flock of exotic birds from the pages of a picture book.
The details of his life are the stuff of legend. Bruno Schulz was a shy, frail, brilliant artist, Jewish and secular, who lived in the far eastern Polish town of Drohobych. When his father died, he took on the job of art teacher at the local high school to support his mother, sister and nephew, though he found the work both exhausting and consuming.
Drohobych was a particularly brutal place to be in the cauldron of World War II. Thousands of people were marched into the nearby forests and killed, or transported to Treblinka to be gassed. For a year, Schulz found a protector and patron in the person of Felix Landau, an art-loving Nazi whose war diary is well known. Tragically, he was shot to death around noon on November 19, 1942, at the intersection of Czaki and Mickiewicz Streets, on the eve of his planned escape.
These lushly worded stories give no warning of the conflagration that is to follow, but the reader's knowledge of Schulz's fate inescapably informs every line. Read The Street of Crocodiles if you're interested in what was lost in the fires of the Holocaust. Read it if you want to be consumed by fiction that burns like poetry. But by all means, read this book.
It would be fair to call Bruno Schulz Poland's greatest twentieth century writer. This collection of stories changes the very definition of what a short story should be. There is a beginning, a middle, and an end, yes, but the writing is best described as delirious, hypnotic, dreamlike. You don't read Schulz for the plot; you read for the prose, the intensely sensual visuals, the way the words unfurl like the leaves of a magical vine. Inanimate objects struggle to come to life. Secret rooms grow strange, trapped gardens. A boy blows away with a gust of wind. His father conjures a flock of exotic birds from the pages of a picture book.
The details of his life are the stuff of legend. Bruno Schulz was a shy, frail, brilliant artist, Jewish and secular, who lived in the far eastern Polish town of Drohobych. When his father died, he took on the job of art teacher at the local high school to support his mother, sister and nephew, though he found the work both exhausting and consuming.
Drohobych was a particularly brutal place to be in the cauldron of World War II. Thousands of people were marched into the nearby forests and killed, or transported to Treblinka to be gassed. For a year, Schulz found a protector and patron in the person of Felix Landau, an art-loving Nazi whose war diary is well known. Tragically, he was shot to death around noon on November 19, 1942, at the intersection of Czaki and Mickiewicz Streets, on the eve of his planned escape.
These lushly worded stories give no warning of the conflagration that is to follow, but the reader's knowledge of Schulz's fate inescapably informs every line. Read The Street of Crocodiles if you're interested in what was lost in the fires of the Holocaust. Read it if you want to be consumed by fiction that burns like poetry. But by all means, read this book.
December 25, 2021
For the most part I want an author to tell me a riveting story in the most inventive and eloquent way possible. I'm not so keen on authors who want to showcase the riches of imagination or stringing together abstract ideas on chains. That said my favourite book is Virginia Woolf's The Waves which belongs to the latter variety. And every time I read a writer who wants to find poetic meaning in the passing moment and thus arrest it, who tries to forge abstract ideas into architecture I marvel anew at how supremely accomplished Virginia's book is.
Just as there are only a limited number of cigarettes you can smoke in a day if you want to sustain the pleasure of the act I found there was a limited number of pages I could read of this every day before I felt surfeited. But now I've finished it I miss it. I miss the thrill of coming across sentences that were like sudden dramatic shifts in the weather. I fully understand why Schulz has influenced so many writers. They gravitate to the best of him which is often spectacular and exhilarating and overlook the excesses when he seems on the brink of outthinking his own mind which can make him difficult to follow at times.
It's easy to think of Schulz as perched high on an imaginary watchtower like a bird looking down at the absurd efforts of human beings to give a semblance of meaning to what if they stopped to think about it would be senseless. This makes the nature of his death - his murder by an SS man as part of some petty tit for tat squabble with a fellow monster - still more grotesque. His wings were of no avail when he most needed them.
Just as there are only a limited number of cigarettes you can smoke in a day if you want to sustain the pleasure of the act I found there was a limited number of pages I could read of this every day before I felt surfeited. But now I've finished it I miss it. I miss the thrill of coming across sentences that were like sudden dramatic shifts in the weather. I fully understand why Schulz has influenced so many writers. They gravitate to the best of him which is often spectacular and exhilarating and overlook the excesses when he seems on the brink of outthinking his own mind which can make him difficult to follow at times.
It's easy to think of Schulz as perched high on an imaginary watchtower like a bird looking down at the absurd efforts of human beings to give a semblance of meaning to what if they stopped to think about it would be senseless. This makes the nature of his death - his murder by an SS man as part of some petty tit for tat squabble with a fellow monster - still more grotesque. His wings were of no avail when he most needed them.
March 31, 2025
This was the most beautiful book I’ve ever read. It’s probably too early to declare Schulz a favorite writer—or maybe it isn’t, since this is half of everything he wrote, or could write, before being murdered in the Holocaust. Flow, flow, my tears, and ease my aching heart.
Cinnamon Shops
“I shall never forget that luminous journey on that brightest of winter nights. The coloured map of the heavens expanded into an immense dome, on which there loomed fantastic lands, oceans and seas, marked with the lines of stellar currents and eddies, with the brilliant streaks of heavenly geography. The air became light to breathe and shimmered like silver gauze. One could smell violets. From under the white woolly lambskin of snow, trembling anemones appeared with a speck of moonlight in each delicate cup. The whole forest seemed to be illuminated by thousands of lights and by the stars falling in profusion from the December sky. The air pulsated with a secret spring, with the matchless purity of snow and violets. We entered a hilly landscape. The lines of hills, bristling with the bare spikes of trees, rose like sighs of bliss. I saw on these happy slopes groups of wanderers, gathering among the moss and the bushes the fallen stars which now were damp from snow. The road became steep, the horse began to slip on it and pulled the creaking cab only with an effort. I was happy. My lungs soaked up the blissful spring in the air, the freshness of snow and stars. Before the horse’s breast the rampart of white snowy foam grew higher and higher, and it could hardly wade through that pure fresh mass. At last we stopped. I got out of the cab. The horse was panting, hanging its head. I hugged its head to my breast and saw that there were tears in its large eyes. I noticed a round black wound on its belly. ‘Why did not you tell me?’ I whispered, crying. ‘My dearest, I did it for you,’ the horse said and became very small, like a wooden toy.”
Eddie
“Adela is completely limp, completely surrendered to the deep rhythm of sleep. She has no strength even to pull up the blanket over her bare thighs and cannot prevent the columns of bedbugs from wandering over her body. These light and thin, leaflike insects run over her so delicately that she does not feel their touch. They are flat receptacles for blood, reddish blood bags without eyes or faces, now on the march in whole clans on a migration of the species subdivided into generations and tribes. They run up from her feet in scores, a never-ending procession, they are larger now, as large as large as moths, flat red vampires without heads, lightweight as if cut out of paper, on legs more delicate than the web of spiders. And when the last laggard bedbugs have come and gone, with an enormous one bringing up the rear, complete silence comes at last. Deep sleep fills the empty passages and apartments, while the rooms slowly begin to absorb the greyness of the hours before dawn.”
Self-Portrait.
Cinnamon Shops
“I shall never forget that luminous journey on that brightest of winter nights. The coloured map of the heavens expanded into an immense dome, on which there loomed fantastic lands, oceans and seas, marked with the lines of stellar currents and eddies, with the brilliant streaks of heavenly geography. The air became light to breathe and shimmered like silver gauze. One could smell violets. From under the white woolly lambskin of snow, trembling anemones appeared with a speck of moonlight in each delicate cup. The whole forest seemed to be illuminated by thousands of lights and by the stars falling in profusion from the December sky. The air pulsated with a secret spring, with the matchless purity of snow and violets. We entered a hilly landscape. The lines of hills, bristling with the bare spikes of trees, rose like sighs of bliss. I saw on these happy slopes groups of wanderers, gathering among the moss and the bushes the fallen stars which now were damp from snow. The road became steep, the horse began to slip on it and pulled the creaking cab only with an effort. I was happy. My lungs soaked up the blissful spring in the air, the freshness of snow and stars. Before the horse’s breast the rampart of white snowy foam grew higher and higher, and it could hardly wade through that pure fresh mass. At last we stopped. I got out of the cab. The horse was panting, hanging its head. I hugged its head to my breast and saw that there were tears in its large eyes. I noticed a round black wound on its belly. ‘Why did not you tell me?’ I whispered, crying. ‘My dearest, I did it for you,’ the horse said and became very small, like a wooden toy.”
Eddie
“Adela is completely limp, completely surrendered to the deep rhythm of sleep. She has no strength even to pull up the blanket over her bare thighs and cannot prevent the columns of bedbugs from wandering over her body. These light and thin, leaflike insects run over her so delicately that she does not feel their touch. They are flat receptacles for blood, reddish blood bags without eyes or faces, now on the march in whole clans on a migration of the species subdivided into generations and tribes. They run up from her feet in scores, a never-ending procession, they are larger now, as large as large as moths, flat red vampires without heads, lightweight as if cut out of paper, on legs more delicate than the web of spiders. And when the last laggard bedbugs have come and gone, with an enormous one bringing up the rear, complete silence comes at last. Deep sleep fills the empty passages and apartments, while the rooms slowly begin to absorb the greyness of the hours before dawn.”
Self-Portrait.
November 24, 2017
Reading Schulz's work is like discovering my newest, best literary friend. Bruno, I wish you had lived longer, though your tragic end might have been merciful, given the later alternatives. It was a strange end to an author of strange work.
The Street of Crocodiles is a fever dream. It is the exposure of the bizarre from behind the curtain of what is "proper". The setting here is every bit as much of a character as the humans, dogs, and birds we come to know:
After we passed a few more houses, the street ceased to maintain any pretense of urbanity, like a man returning to his little village who, piece by piece, strips off his Sunday best, slowly changing back into a peasant as he gets closer to his home.
This abandonment of pretense is a running theme throughout these vignettes. Civility is continually stripped away to reveal the ugly, beautiful, rotting, shining underneath. Is it any wonder that the Brothers Quay did a cinematic version of The Street of Crocodiles?
Take, for example, the account of madness setting into a narrator's father:
Then again came days of quiet, concentrated work, interrupted by lonely monologues. While he sat there in the light of the lamp among the pillows of the large bed, and the room grew enormous as the shadows above the lampshade merged with the deep city night beyond the windows, he felt, without looking, how the pullulating jungle of wallpaper, filled with whispers, lisping and hissing, closed in around him. He heard, without looking a conspiracy of knowingly winking hidden eyes, of alert ears opening up among the flowers on the wall, of dark, smiling mouths.
He then pretended to become even more engrossed in his work, adding and calculating, trying not to betray the anger which rose in him and overcoming the temptation to throw himself blindly forward with a sudden shout to grab fistfuls of those curly arabesques, or of those sheaves of eyes and ears which swarmed out from the night and grew and multiplied, sprouting, with ever-new ghostlike shoots and branches, from the womb of darkness.
But Schulz is not only able to paint a wonderful visual picture again and again; he also has a keen gift for evocation by allusion, as when he describes one of his characters, Charles, meditating:
One of his eyes would then slightly squint to the outside, as if leaving for another dimension.
Brilliant. If I knew nothing else about this character, this one line speaks volumes about Charles' motivations and inner life, while causing me to be instantly suspicious, as well as fascinated, by this one strange tic.
At one step of abstraction further, we must note that Schulz not only provides mood, he describes mood in a way that draws the reader in, or, rather, infects the reader in the mind's eye:
In an atmosphere of excessive facility, every whim flies high, a passing excitement swells into an empty parasitic growth; a light gray vegetation of fluffy weeds, of colorless poppies sprouts forth, made from a weightless fabric of nightmares and hashish.
In a word, his work is incredible. Schulz will take you to the extremes of exhilaration and debilitating depression. His work fascinates and enthralls, like a dream from which one cannot awaken. Even in its darkest moments, I would not want to awaken from such an awe-inspiring literary dream. The "weightless fabric of nightmares and hashish," indeed!
The Street of Crocodiles is a fever dream. It is the exposure of the bizarre from behind the curtain of what is "proper". The setting here is every bit as much of a character as the humans, dogs, and birds we come to know:
After we passed a few more houses, the street ceased to maintain any pretense of urbanity, like a man returning to his little village who, piece by piece, strips off his Sunday best, slowly changing back into a peasant as he gets closer to his home.
This abandonment of pretense is a running theme throughout these vignettes. Civility is continually stripped away to reveal the ugly, beautiful, rotting, shining underneath. Is it any wonder that the Brothers Quay did a cinematic version of The Street of Crocodiles?
Take, for example, the account of madness setting into a narrator's father:
Then again came days of quiet, concentrated work, interrupted by lonely monologues. While he sat there in the light of the lamp among the pillows of the large bed, and the room grew enormous as the shadows above the lampshade merged with the deep city night beyond the windows, he felt, without looking, how the pullulating jungle of wallpaper, filled with whispers, lisping and hissing, closed in around him. He heard, without looking a conspiracy of knowingly winking hidden eyes, of alert ears opening up among the flowers on the wall, of dark, smiling mouths.
He then pretended to become even more engrossed in his work, adding and calculating, trying not to betray the anger which rose in him and overcoming the temptation to throw himself blindly forward with a sudden shout to grab fistfuls of those curly arabesques, or of those sheaves of eyes and ears which swarmed out from the night and grew and multiplied, sprouting, with ever-new ghostlike shoots and branches, from the womb of darkness.
But Schulz is not only able to paint a wonderful visual picture again and again; he also has a keen gift for evocation by allusion, as when he describes one of his characters, Charles, meditating:
One of his eyes would then slightly squint to the outside, as if leaving for another dimension.
Brilliant. If I knew nothing else about this character, this one line speaks volumes about Charles' motivations and inner life, while causing me to be instantly suspicious, as well as fascinated, by this one strange tic.
At one step of abstraction further, we must note that Schulz not only provides mood, he describes mood in a way that draws the reader in, or, rather, infects the reader in the mind's eye:
In an atmosphere of excessive facility, every whim flies high, a passing excitement swells into an empty parasitic growth; a light gray vegetation of fluffy weeds, of colorless poppies sprouts forth, made from a weightless fabric of nightmares and hashish.
In a word, his work is incredible. Schulz will take you to the extremes of exhilaration and debilitating depression. His work fascinates and enthralls, like a dream from which one cannot awaken. Even in its darkest moments, I would not want to awaken from such an awe-inspiring literary dream. The "weightless fabric of nightmares and hashish," indeed!
December 10, 2007
In the spirit of my rambling memoir/ book reviews I will begin with a childhood anecdote that somehow connects or correlates or resonates or slaps a high five with this book.
I was raised by a sugar-free bran loving mother. No soda ("You're better off drinking pool water Nora! Here, Christ, take a straw; go out and drink pool water if you're so intent on poisoning yourself.") No white bread (again, a reference to cholorine or bleach- some sort of chemical that would rot and/ or sicken my small insides). Because of this oat bran regime I became a sugar fiend at age three (carob didn't cut it, nor did occasional nutella oatbran toasts). I used every last nickel and dime - I begged borrowed or pilfered- I recycled and cleaned couches- all in the name of candy. Glorious candy. Over time I developed a ritualistic habit of eating particular types of candy. For the most part the ceremony involved Skittles and M&M's though Mike and Ikes and Starburst worked well enough. While my younger brother drank his treats down, I sat patiently, criss cross on the floor, and slid each candy coated jewel from it's pouch onto the ground before me. And then I began. With great calm and focus I silently arranged the sugary pearls- I organized, designed, and created small scale works of mathematical genius. Gingery, I slid and placed and replaced the spheres. Following my vision I arranged the mandalas, carefully eating just one orb at a time, re-arranging to compensate as sugar rounds were sacrificed to satisfy my cravings. This ritual lasted well over an hour... much to the dismay of my still not sated, impatient brother.
Somehow, reading this book triggered that memory, and the only explanation I can come up with is that Schulz' stories, each one, is as wonderful to me now as a bag of Skittles was twenty some years ago... I desperately wanted each chapter to last- I read whole paragraphs and pages over and over again, wanting the imagery evoked to remain firmly planted in my mind. I wanted to weigh it down with some sort of ballast as lately little stays for all that long up there without a modicum of obsession and a striking amount of effort. I was like a skipping record player with some sentences, there were momentary mantras and autistic mumblings. Each story, though they are all linked, was like the most masterful sugar structure, the most precariously balanced, breath taking M&M monument.
Shulz' father, Jacob, is hands down the most fascinating character I have encountered on the page in some time. His relationships with birds, with cockroaches, with women, with fabric, are amazing. Jacob is my ideal client... I only want to work in a clinic filled with Jacob Schulzes and deformed birds. There will of course be plenty of shelving for all to climb and perch upon.
Schulz writes like no one I have read before... his imagination seems so pure, so untainted or constricted... I don't know what else to say. Andiamo! To the bookstore my bella faccias!
I was raised by a sugar-free bran loving mother. No soda ("You're better off drinking pool water Nora! Here, Christ, take a straw; go out and drink pool water if you're so intent on poisoning yourself.") No white bread (again, a reference to cholorine or bleach- some sort of chemical that would rot and/ or sicken my small insides). Because of this oat bran regime I became a sugar fiend at age three (carob didn't cut it, nor did occasional nutella oatbran toasts). I used every last nickel and dime - I begged borrowed or pilfered- I recycled and cleaned couches- all in the name of candy. Glorious candy. Over time I developed a ritualistic habit of eating particular types of candy. For the most part the ceremony involved Skittles and M&M's though Mike and Ikes and Starburst worked well enough. While my younger brother drank his treats down, I sat patiently, criss cross on the floor, and slid each candy coated jewel from it's pouch onto the ground before me. And then I began. With great calm and focus I silently arranged the sugary pearls- I organized, designed, and created small scale works of mathematical genius. Gingery, I slid and placed and replaced the spheres. Following my vision I arranged the mandalas, carefully eating just one orb at a time, re-arranging to compensate as sugar rounds were sacrificed to satisfy my cravings. This ritual lasted well over an hour... much to the dismay of my still not sated, impatient brother.
Somehow, reading this book triggered that memory, and the only explanation I can come up with is that Schulz' stories, each one, is as wonderful to me now as a bag of Skittles was twenty some years ago... I desperately wanted each chapter to last- I read whole paragraphs and pages over and over again, wanting the imagery evoked to remain firmly planted in my mind. I wanted to weigh it down with some sort of ballast as lately little stays for all that long up there without a modicum of obsession and a striking amount of effort. I was like a skipping record player with some sentences, there were momentary mantras and autistic mumblings. Each story, though they are all linked, was like the most masterful sugar structure, the most precariously balanced, breath taking M&M monument.
Shulz' father, Jacob, is hands down the most fascinating character I have encountered on the page in some time. His relationships with birds, with cockroaches, with women, with fabric, are amazing. Jacob is my ideal client... I only want to work in a clinic filled with Jacob Schulzes and deformed birds. There will of course be plenty of shelving for all to climb and perch upon.
Schulz writes like no one I have read before... his imagination seems so pure, so untainted or constricted... I don't know what else to say. Andiamo! To the bookstore my bella faccias!
January 10, 2018
Bruno Schulz aslen ressam. Çok da trajik bir hayat hikayesi var. Kısacık, vurucu. 2. Dünya Savaşı döneminde okulda çizim dersleri veriyor, Kızıl Ordu için duvar resimleri çiziyor bir yandan. Sonra naziler Almanya’yı işgal ediyor. İnsanlar toplama kamplarına gönderiliyor ama Bruno Schulz “faydalı Yahudi” uygulaması denen bir uygulama dedikleri şey (işe yarayan Yahudileri yanlarında tutuyorlar) yüzünden kampa gönderilmiyor, tabiriz caizse kenara ayrılıyor. Faydalı Yahudi olarak bir subayın yanında yaşamaya çalışmaya başlıyor. O dönemde de o subayın isteği dahilinde resim çiziyor, ona hizmet ediyor. Daha sonra başka bir subay tarafından sokak ortasında öldürülüyor. Ceset öylece kalıyor ve nereye gömüldüğü belli değil.
Edebiyata girişi ise, dönemin başka yazarlarıyla mektuplaşmasıyla başlıyor. Schulz Lehçe yazan bir yazar. Kafka ile özdeşleştiriliyormuş hatta Kafka’yı Lehçeye çevirmiş. Ama iyice didikleyince Kafka’yla benzeştiği kadar ayrıştığı yönünü keşfediyoruz.
Gelelim Tarçın Dükkanları’na, kitaptaki metinler için büyülü gerçekçi metinler diyebiliriz. Hemen hemen her biri fantastik öğeler taşıyor. Yazarın aslen ressam olmasından kaynaklanan inanılmaz bir tasvir yeteneği var, adeta kelimelerle resim yapıyor. Nesnelere, doğaya, harekete bakış muazzam. Detaylar insanı şaşırtıyor. Anlıyoruz ki yazar alışılmadık gözle bakıyor ve görüyor. Kurduğu dünya çocuksu çünkü anlatıcısı çocuk, bir yandan neşeli bir yandan da çok tekinsiz bu nedenle.
Kitap baba temasıyla başlıyor ve öyle de devam ediyor. Baba oğul isimleri, Jozef ve Yakup. Bildiğimiz Yakup’la Yusuf baba-oğul miti üzerine kurulduğunu hissediyoruz. Dini göndermeleri oldukça fazla bir kitap. Öykülerdeki baba teması üzerinden düşünürsek kitabı, Kafka ile anılması doğal geliyor ama ikisinin oluşturduğu baba figürü birbirinden alabildiğine uzak. Schulz’un baba figürü hep çökmekte, yitmekte olan bir baba. Schulz’u bu metinlerde Kafka’dan ayıran diğer bir yan ise, o Kafka’nın aksine, gerçekçiliğin sınırlarınız zorlarken gerçeküstü öğeler kullanmıyor. Zamanla bozmuş sanki aklını. Zaman ölçüsünü bilinçli olarak bozuyor, bizi zamandan buna bağlı olarak da olay örgüsünden uzak tutuyor.
Öykülerin diğer güzel bir özelliği çok yönlü okumaya müsait olması. Tarçın Dükkanları öyküsü, bir çocuğun kayboluş öyküsü olarak da okunabilir, sanayileşmenin başlamasıyla kaybolan şeylerin bir temsili olarak da anlamlandırılabilir.
Gel gelelim, ben bu kitabı herkese tavsiye eder miyim diye düşünüyorum, cevabım bir türlü netleşemiyor. Okuması çok basit bir kitap değil çünkü yukarıda da bahsettiğim gibi olay örgüsünden okuyucuyu olabildiğince uzak tutan metinler bunlar.
Zamanı kelimeler üzerinden eğip bükebilen başka bir dünya kurabilen çok özel bir yazar, çok özel bir kitap Tarçın Dükkanları. Farklı okuma deneyimlerine açık okuyucuların beğeneceğini umduğum bir eser. Okurken keyfine varabilecek okuyucuya ulaşmasını dilerim.
Edebiyata girişi ise, dönemin başka yazarlarıyla mektuplaşmasıyla başlıyor. Schulz Lehçe yazan bir yazar. Kafka ile özdeşleştiriliyormuş hatta Kafka’yı Lehçeye çevirmiş. Ama iyice didikleyince Kafka’yla benzeştiği kadar ayrıştığı yönünü keşfediyoruz.
Gelelim Tarçın Dükkanları’na, kitaptaki metinler için büyülü gerçekçi metinler diyebiliriz. Hemen hemen her biri fantastik öğeler taşıyor. Yazarın aslen ressam olmasından kaynaklanan inanılmaz bir tasvir yeteneği var, adeta kelimelerle resim yapıyor. Nesnelere, doğaya, harekete bakış muazzam. Detaylar insanı şaşırtıyor. Anlıyoruz ki yazar alışılmadık gözle bakıyor ve görüyor. Kurduğu dünya çocuksu çünkü anlatıcısı çocuk, bir yandan neşeli bir yandan da çok tekinsiz bu nedenle.
Kitap baba temasıyla başlıyor ve öyle de devam ediyor. Baba oğul isimleri, Jozef ve Yakup. Bildiğimiz Yakup’la Yusuf baba-oğul miti üzerine kurulduğunu hissediyoruz. Dini göndermeleri oldukça fazla bir kitap. Öykülerdeki baba teması üzerinden düşünürsek kitabı, Kafka ile anılması doğal geliyor ama ikisinin oluşturduğu baba figürü birbirinden alabildiğine uzak. Schulz’un baba figürü hep çökmekte, yitmekte olan bir baba. Schulz’u bu metinlerde Kafka’dan ayıran diğer bir yan ise, o Kafka’nın aksine, gerçekçiliğin sınırlarınız zorlarken gerçeküstü öğeler kullanmıyor. Zamanla bozmuş sanki aklını. Zaman ölçüsünü bilinçli olarak bozuyor, bizi zamandan buna bağlı olarak da olay örgüsünden uzak tutuyor.
Öykülerin diğer güzel bir özelliği çok yönlü okumaya müsait olması. Tarçın Dükkanları öyküsü, bir çocuğun kayboluş öyküsü olarak da okunabilir, sanayileşmenin başlamasıyla kaybolan şeylerin bir temsili olarak da anlamlandırılabilir.
Gel gelelim, ben bu kitabı herkese tavsiye eder miyim diye düşünüyorum, cevabım bir türlü netleşemiyor. Okuması çok basit bir kitap değil çünkü yukarıda da bahsettiğim gibi olay örgüsünden okuyucuyu olabildiğince uzak tutan metinler bunlar.
Zamanı kelimeler üzerinden eğip bükebilen başka bir dünya kurabilen çok özel bir yazar, çok özel bir kitap Tarçın Dükkanları. Farklı okuma deneyimlerine açık okuyucuların beğeneceğini umduğum bir eser. Okurken keyfine varabilecek okuyucuya ulaşmasını dilerim.
September 5, 2025
Die Zimtläden von Bruno Schulz zu lesen ist wie die Eintrittskarte zu einem Geheimbund, insgemein im polnischen Original. Seine Sprache ist einmalig. Schon die ersten Zeilen, laut gelesen, fühlen sich an wie ein Zauberspruch: Wertowaliśmy, odurzeni światłem, w tej wielkiej księdze wakacyj, której wszystkie karty palały od blasku i miały na dnie słodki do omdlenia miąższ złotych gruszek. Der dem Polnischen nicht mächtige Leser dieses Rückblicks mag schon am Schriftbild erahnen, das hier etwas Magisches abläuft, dass hier ein Maler mit Worten unterwegs ist. Und dabei beschreibt Schulz Alltag, banale Erlebnisse, zumeist aus der Sicht eines Jungen am Vorabend der Adoleszenz.
Die Kapitel des Buches schildern lose zusammenhängende Szenen. Neben dem Erzähler spielt der erkrankte und exzentrische Vater ein große Rolle, der – wie auch der Autor – unter dem Verlust des Eleganz des Lebens unter dem Ansturm der modernen Welt leidet. In der Sprache des Buches ist dies der Gegensatz der „Zimtläden“ zu der „Street of Crocodiles“ (wie das Buch im Englisch Sprachraum betitelt wird). Beides Kapitelüberschriften. Tatsächlich erlebte Bruno Schulzens Heimat, das verschlafene k&k-Provinzstädtchen Drohobytsch (ukr. Дрогобич) Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts infolge von Erdölfunden eine rasante Industrialisierung.
Wenn auch keine Offenbarung, so war und ist dieses Buch doch eine Erfahrung, die nachschwingt und der gelegentlichen Vertiefung verlangt – entweder durch die erneute Lektüre oder mittels des Buches Das Sanatorium zur Sanduhr, des zweiten großen Werkes dieses Autors, der 50jährig von einem deutschen SS-Mannes erschossen wurde.
Die Kapitel des Buches schildern lose zusammenhängende Szenen. Neben dem Erzähler spielt der erkrankte und exzentrische Vater ein große Rolle, der – wie auch der Autor – unter dem Verlust des Eleganz des Lebens unter dem Ansturm der modernen Welt leidet. In der Sprache des Buches ist dies der Gegensatz der „Zimtläden“ zu der „Street of Crocodiles“ (wie das Buch im Englisch Sprachraum betitelt wird). Beides Kapitelüberschriften. Tatsächlich erlebte Bruno Schulzens Heimat, das verschlafene k&k-Provinzstädtchen Drohobytsch (ukr. Дрогобич) Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts infolge von Erdölfunden eine rasante Industrialisierung.
Wenn auch keine Offenbarung, so war und ist dieses Buch doch eine Erfahrung, die nachschwingt und der gelegentlichen Vertiefung verlangt – entweder durch die erneute Lektüre oder mittels des Buches Das Sanatorium zur Sanduhr, des zweiten großen Werkes dieses Autors, der 50jährig von einem deutschen SS-Mannes erschossen wurde.
August 31, 2016
A šta da kažem, ovo mi je valjda četvrti put da čitam Šulcove priče, i svaki put na kraju samo sedim i trepćem. Ovo je kao Kafka, ali mnogo... šarenije, bukvalno šarenije, sa raskošnim bojama, sa neverovatnim prelivima između živog i neživog, organskog i neorganskog, u ovoj vrlo specifičnoj varijanti srednjeevropske fantastike; pored tipično kafkinske opsednutosti ocem i sveprožimajućeg apsurda - Šulc je očaran životom, njegovom čulnom stranom (opisi leta, opisi voća, tkanine, svejedno čega, sve je erotizovano do koske), i to zapravo pokušava da nam predoči, a ne sad tamo neki zaplet (pffft! zaplet!) ili besmislenost života ili zagušljivost palanke ili štagod. Pet zvezdica ko kuća.
April 4, 2023
czułam, że jeśli przypadkiem upuszczę tę książkę, to albo rozpłynie się w powietrzu, albo rozłoży się na części pierwsze; zbyt intrygująco absurdalne, bym sama mogła je na nowo poskładać
March 12, 2020
Do Furniture and wallpaper have life? Are they in permanent chaos? Are they subject to the workings of systems and so with that are as entropic as all other systems? Do Demiurges treat tailors dummies no different than empty rooms? Can a man turn into the rubber tube of an enema?
In dementia can wise questions come. Tailors Dummy is a work of genius.
So is Birds. Cinnamon Shops and The Comet come so close.
But I don’t feel much different than I did about Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. I wrote that that was “ ....a heady mix of the metaphor with childlike fantasy and delirious dreaming that seemingly mixes the authors life memories/observations that cover his childhood through to the fear of old age and all the trials and tribulations in between.” And for me so is this, the more famous of the authors only two surviving books. All very weird and metaphorical that reaches amazing heights and then has me going Huh? What happened there?
In dementia can wise questions come. Tailors Dummy is a work of genius.
So is Birds. Cinnamon Shops and The Comet come so close.
But I don’t feel much different than I did about Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. I wrote that that was “ ....a heady mix of the metaphor with childlike fantasy and delirious dreaming that seemingly mixes the authors life memories/observations that cover his childhood through to the fear of old age and all the trials and tribulations in between.” And for me so is this, the more famous of the authors only two surviving books. All very weird and metaphorical that reaches amazing heights and then has me going Huh? What happened there?
March 17, 2017
A volume of Bruno Schulz stories is like an impossibly delicious and ornate gateau; it's impossible to eat the whole thing at once. (Although this didn't take me as long to read as the dates above may suggest: it was more like a fortnight's worth of days, in two phases separated by eleven months.) But it's also not simply the feast of sweetmeats and beauty that this collection's more fitting, original Polish title, Cinnamon Shops may suggest: in among the glittering decorations are also, if you look more closely, alarmingly sinister, creepy gothic ones.
A couple of years ago, I said a lot of what I'd still say about Schulz, in the second half of this post, along with some favourite quotes, in reviewing a novella about him which also reprinted a couple of his stories - and which, finally, belatedly, got me reading him. (I'd known of Schulz for a long time, but as mentioned there, had always been put off by the title The Street of Crocodiles, combined with the seriousness and slight sadism of the black and white illustration on the front of the recent Penguin Classics editions. I'd have gone instead for this side of his drawing style, for it's lovely combination of realism and what might now be called chibi-ness, and which matches the caricature-like, fantastical nature of his metamorphoses of family and friends into his fictional characters. Its childlike-ness is far nearer the essence of the book than the fetishy foot-in-the-face of the Penguin choice.)
The couple of stories I'd previously read, 'Birds' and 'Cinnamon Shops', contained much of the essence of Schulz's fiction, but a few things were new to me in reading the whole Street of Crocodiles volume. (This was just his first collection of stories I read, not one of the editions that confusingly combines it with Sanatorium Under the Hourglass while still using the earlier title.) One is how Adela, the maid, is the calm centre of the household who restores balance and order - I was always so glad when she bustled into view - in contrast to the fantastically eccentric parents whose establishment it technically is.
After reading 'Nimrod' and 'Cockroaches' I understand more about why Schulz is compared to Kafka as a writer, and not just as a personality. That Schulz came up with these two stories without having read 'Investigations of a Dog' or 'Metamorphosis' shows, I think, how each author was a lightning rod for certain features in the culture of his times and region, drawn by their similar character traits. (I don't think Kafka was so widely known, nor that mass media communications were so good, that Schulz might have picked up the essence of the stories without having read them, as one might nowadays.) 'Cockroaches' is one of a number of stories or mere sentences that seem to prefigure elements of the rise of Nazism and the Holocaust which would kill the author less than ten years after the book was published. Granted, many if not most classic novels from the 1920s and 30s contain the occasional nod to the forms of racism and eugenicism which were pervasive and prevalent at the time, and perhaps I found some of it more poignant and sad than elsewhere because of Schulz's own fate. He was not immune, for how would he necessarily know to be, to making an unflattering description of effeminate men and dark-skinned ladies (in the title story); and for a Jewish man in 1933 to have written of a member of his own family turning into a cockroach feels far more obviously and frighteningly illustrative of insults that we can readily assume existed in the streets and printed media than it does in 1915. (Yet it's not as if there wasn't also violent antisemitism then; the dark clouds of history just make one see differently.) Then there is the uncle stripped of his personality (by stringent psychoanalysis, a dig at Freudians, perhaps?) made functional, mechanical, a Taylorist's dream: into a doorbell. Perhaps most chilling were parts of 'The Comet': One day my brother, on his return from school, brought the improbable and yet true news of the imminent end of the world. We asked him to repeat it, thinking that we had misheard. We hadn't... unready and unfinished, just as it was, at a random point in time and space, without closing its accounts, without having reached any goal, in mid-sentence as it were, without a period or exclamation mark, without a last judgement or God's Wrath - in an atmosphere of friendly understanding, loyally, by mutual agreement and in accordance with rules observed by both parties - the world was to be hit on the head, simply and irrevocably. Several pages later (though still mid story) they marked the paths of a sleepy cosmography, while, in reality, black as soot, they succumbed to a planetary lethargy, as if they had put their heads into the fireplace, the final goal of all those blind flights. I cannot but hear, here, the bewildering stasis of the man who (like Hungarian Antal Szerb), depite no shortage of offers to get him and his great talent to safety, remained in his hometown as the Nazis took over and was eventually murdered as a result.
Celina Wieniewska's original translation of Schulz still appears to be the only one in print, and I can see why; it is beautiful reading in English, it still feels right alongside modern traditions of fantasy, fairytale retellings and the gothic - at least for someone who can't read the original, it seems no improvement is required - and the only thing out of place to the contemporary eye, used to new translations, is that many characters' names are anglicised.
Despite what I may have said in the last few paragraphs…
What this book is not: depressing Holocaust lit; cold, dry, serious East European SF (I used to think it would be, the way I imagine the Strugatskys); continually or frequently ugly; pinched and cornered and paranoid and stressful like Kafka (I don’t enjoy Kafka, sorry).
It is: deliciously language- and metaphor-rich, it is fantastical, it is often escapist, it is fun (if your idea of fun can include the occasional bit of queasy Gothicism). Schulz is better known than he was, but there are still friends who haven’t read him whom I think would love this. He’s not for absolutely everyone, but he’s the sort of writer whose work you want to actively press on those you think would enjoy it, it’s so wonderful.
A couple of years ago, I said a lot of what I'd still say about Schulz, in the second half of this post, along with some favourite quotes, in reviewing a novella about him which also reprinted a couple of his stories - and which, finally, belatedly, got me reading him. (I'd known of Schulz for a long time, but as mentioned there, had always been put off by the title The Street of Crocodiles, combined with the seriousness and slight sadism of the black and white illustration on the front of the recent Penguin Classics editions. I'd have gone instead for this side of his drawing style, for it's lovely combination of realism and what might now be called chibi-ness, and which matches the caricature-like, fantastical nature of his metamorphoses of family and friends into his fictional characters. Its childlike-ness is far nearer the essence of the book than the fetishy foot-in-the-face of the Penguin choice.)
The couple of stories I'd previously read, 'Birds' and 'Cinnamon Shops', contained much of the essence of Schulz's fiction, but a few things were new to me in reading the whole Street of Crocodiles volume. (This was just his first collection of stories I read, not one of the editions that confusingly combines it with Sanatorium Under the Hourglass while still using the earlier title.) One is how Adela, the maid, is the calm centre of the household who restores balance and order - I was always so glad when she bustled into view - in contrast to the fantastically eccentric parents whose establishment it technically is.
After reading 'Nimrod' and 'Cockroaches' I understand more about why Schulz is compared to Kafka as a writer, and not just as a personality. That Schulz came up with these two stories without having read 'Investigations of a Dog' or 'Metamorphosis' shows, I think, how each author was a lightning rod for certain features in the culture of his times and region, drawn by their similar character traits. (I don't think Kafka was so widely known, nor that mass media communications were so good, that Schulz might have picked up the essence of the stories without having read them, as one might nowadays.) 'Cockroaches' is one of a number of stories or mere sentences that seem to prefigure elements of the rise of Nazism and the Holocaust which would kill the author less than ten years after the book was published. Granted, many if not most classic novels from the 1920s and 30s contain the occasional nod to the forms of racism and eugenicism which were pervasive and prevalent at the time, and perhaps I found some of it more poignant and sad than elsewhere because of Schulz's own fate. He was not immune, for how would he necessarily know to be, to making an unflattering description of effeminate men and dark-skinned ladies (in the title story); and for a Jewish man in 1933 to have written of a member of his own family turning into a cockroach feels far more obviously and frighteningly illustrative of insults that we can readily assume existed in the streets and printed media than it does in 1915. (Yet it's not as if there wasn't also violent antisemitism then; the dark clouds of history just make one see differently.) Then there is the uncle stripped of his personality (by stringent psychoanalysis, a dig at Freudians, perhaps?) made functional, mechanical, a Taylorist's dream: into a doorbell. Perhaps most chilling were parts of 'The Comet': One day my brother, on his return from school, brought the improbable and yet true news of the imminent end of the world. We asked him to repeat it, thinking that we had misheard. We hadn't... unready and unfinished, just as it was, at a random point in time and space, without closing its accounts, without having reached any goal, in mid-sentence as it were, without a period or exclamation mark, without a last judgement or God's Wrath - in an atmosphere of friendly understanding, loyally, by mutual agreement and in accordance with rules observed by both parties - the world was to be hit on the head, simply and irrevocably. Several pages later (though still mid story) they marked the paths of a sleepy cosmography, while, in reality, black as soot, they succumbed to a planetary lethargy, as if they had put their heads into the fireplace, the final goal of all those blind flights. I cannot but hear, here, the bewildering stasis of the man who (like Hungarian Antal Szerb), depite no shortage of offers to get him and his great talent to safety, remained in his hometown as the Nazis took over and was eventually murdered as a result.
Celina Wieniewska's original translation of Schulz still appears to be the only one in print, and I can see why; it is beautiful reading in English, it still feels right alongside modern traditions of fantasy, fairytale retellings and the gothic - at least for someone who can't read the original, it seems no improvement is required - and the only thing out of place to the contemporary eye, used to new translations, is that many characters' names are anglicised.
Despite what I may have said in the last few paragraphs…
What this book is not: depressing Holocaust lit; cold, dry, serious East European SF (I used to think it would be, the way I imagine the Strugatskys); continually or frequently ugly; pinched and cornered and paranoid and stressful like Kafka (I don’t enjoy Kafka, sorry).
It is: deliciously language- and metaphor-rich, it is fantastical, it is often escapist, it is fun (if your idea of fun can include the occasional bit of queasy Gothicism). Schulz is better known than he was, but there are still friends who haven’t read him whom I think would love this. He’s not for absolutely everyone, but he’s the sort of writer whose work you want to actively press on those you think would enjoy it, it’s so wonderful.
June 8, 2016
This book. This goddamn book.
The Street of Crocodiles tore threw me like electricity. Or enchiladas. Or electric enchiladas. You get the picture. It is so painfully lovely, so exquisitely wrought, that you have to read it to believe the defying of gravity that Schulz accomplishes here. This rare astronaut; this martyred martian. The most immediate comparison (which I don’t know why I feel compelled to make, other than with hope that it compels someone to read it) is Calvino’s Cities. In terms of plot, there’s zilch in terms of similarity. They both, however, haven’t a single word out of place and each sentence seems as much a leap of faith as something that sprang from the head of a human being—a pen-clutching Athena. You can also open either to a random chapter and be transported in toto to a morphing world in that fantastical DMZ between beauty and madness. The principal difference—and the reason that I do Schulz a disservice—is because this book has authentic pain throughout.
Excuse me while I whip out my superlatives: effusive, brilliant, gorgeous, prodigious extraordinariness, virtuosic canonical genius, &c. There aren’t enough words to throw at this slim volume to even begin to hint at the grandeur inside. So…I’ll let it speak where I fail:
“From that faded distance of the periphery, the city rose and grew toward the center of the map, an undifferentiated mass at first, a dense complex of blocks and houses, cut by deep canyons of streets, to become on the first plan a group of single houses, etched with the sharp clarity of a landscape seen through binoculars. In that section of the map, the engraver concentrated on the complicated and manifold profusion of streets and alleyways, the sharp lines of cornices, architraves, archivolts, and pilasters, lit by the dark gold of a late and cloudy afternoon which steeped all corners and recesses in the deep sepia of shade. The solids and prisms of that shade darkly honeycombed the ravines of streets, drowning in a warm color here half a street, there a gap between houses. They dramatized and orchestrated in a bleak romantic chiaroscuro the complex architectural polyphony.”
This is the first book of the year that I will reread before it is over. It joins the ranks of my immortal loves. For however long I’m lucky enough to convert oxygen into CO2 for plants, it will never be far from my side. If all of this sounds overly precious and gushing, trust me: The Street of Crocodiles deserves everything I have and more. Bless you, Bruno, bless you. I kiss your eyes in the graveyard hidden beneath the earth of Europe’s shame.
The Street of Crocodiles tore threw me like electricity. Or enchiladas. Or electric enchiladas. You get the picture. It is so painfully lovely, so exquisitely wrought, that you have to read it to believe the defying of gravity that Schulz accomplishes here. This rare astronaut; this martyred martian. The most immediate comparison (which I don’t know why I feel compelled to make, other than with hope that it compels someone to read it) is Calvino’s Cities. In terms of plot, there’s zilch in terms of similarity. They both, however, haven’t a single word out of place and each sentence seems as much a leap of faith as something that sprang from the head of a human being—a pen-clutching Athena. You can also open either to a random chapter and be transported in toto to a morphing world in that fantastical DMZ between beauty and madness. The principal difference—and the reason that I do Schulz a disservice—is because this book has authentic pain throughout.
Excuse me while I whip out my superlatives: effusive, brilliant, gorgeous, prodigious extraordinariness, virtuosic canonical genius, &c. There aren’t enough words to throw at this slim volume to even begin to hint at the grandeur inside. So…I’ll let it speak where I fail:
“From that faded distance of the periphery, the city rose and grew toward the center of the map, an undifferentiated mass at first, a dense complex of blocks and houses, cut by deep canyons of streets, to become on the first plan a group of single houses, etched with the sharp clarity of a landscape seen through binoculars. In that section of the map, the engraver concentrated on the complicated and manifold profusion of streets and alleyways, the sharp lines of cornices, architraves, archivolts, and pilasters, lit by the dark gold of a late and cloudy afternoon which steeped all corners and recesses in the deep sepia of shade. The solids and prisms of that shade darkly honeycombed the ravines of streets, drowning in a warm color here half a street, there a gap between houses. They dramatized and orchestrated in a bleak romantic chiaroscuro the complex architectural polyphony.”
This is the first book of the year that I will reread before it is over. It joins the ranks of my immortal loves. For however long I’m lucky enough to convert oxygen into CO2 for plants, it will never be far from my side. If all of this sounds overly precious and gushing, trust me: The Street of Crocodiles deserves everything I have and more. Bless you, Bruno, bless you. I kiss your eyes in the graveyard hidden beneath the earth of Europe’s shame.
May 9, 2023
Poezia care se revarsă din scriitura lui Bruno Schulz te încântă, și culmea, la un moment, te simți epuizat de frumusețea metaforelor.
O carte frumoasă ca o bijuterie, o carte care m-a provocat, dar pe care nu am putut să o citesc decât în momentele în care nu eram locuită de oboseală, căci ea impune o atenție constantă. O recomand, mie mi-a amintit de Kafka, și nu doar datorită obsesiei figurii paterne.
"Ce este un amurg de primăvară? Ne găsim la sfârșitul cuvintelor, care devin nebuloase, delirante și iresponsabile. Cu toate acestea, abia dincolo de hotarele lor începe ceea ce este nemărginit și inexprimabil în această primăvară. Abia dincolo de cuvinte, unde puterea magiei noastre nu mai acționează, începe să se deslușească vuietul acestei întunecate și necuprinse stihii."
" [...] scãpãm controlul asupra continuitãţii zilei și, în cele din urmã, încetãm sã mai facem presiuni asupra ei, renunţãm, fãrã pãrere de rãu, la scheletul cronologiei neîntrerupte, pe care ne obișnuiserãm cândva sã o urmãrim atent din viciu și dintr-o grijulie disciplinã cotidianã. Am sacrificat de mult disponibilitatea noastrã permanentã de a justifica timpul parcurs, scrupulozitatea de a motiva orele utilizate –mândria și ambiţia economiei noastre. Am abandonat de mult toate virtuţile fundamentale în care altãdatã nu cunoșteam șovãire și eroare.”
„Tot mai clar se contureazã incongruenţa timpului nostru individual. Timpul tatãlui meu și timpul meu propriu nu mai coincideau.”
O carte frumoasă ca o bijuterie, o carte care m-a provocat, dar pe care nu am putut să o citesc decât în momentele în care nu eram locuită de oboseală, căci ea impune o atenție constantă. O recomand, mie mi-a amintit de Kafka, și nu doar datorită obsesiei figurii paterne.
"Ce este un amurg de primăvară? Ne găsim la sfârșitul cuvintelor, care devin nebuloase, delirante și iresponsabile. Cu toate acestea, abia dincolo de hotarele lor începe ceea ce este nemărginit și inexprimabil în această primăvară. Abia dincolo de cuvinte, unde puterea magiei noastre nu mai acționează, începe să se deslușească vuietul acestei întunecate și necuprinse stihii."
" [...] scãpãm controlul asupra continuitãţii zilei și, în cele din urmã, încetãm sã mai facem presiuni asupra ei, renunţãm, fãrã pãrere de rãu, la scheletul cronologiei neîntrerupte, pe care ne obișnuiserãm cândva sã o urmãrim atent din viciu și dintr-o grijulie disciplinã cotidianã. Am sacrificat de mult disponibilitatea noastrã permanentã de a justifica timpul parcurs, scrupulozitatea de a motiva orele utilizate –mândria și ambiţia economiei noastre. Am abandonat de mult toate virtuţile fundamentale în care altãdatã nu cunoșteam șovãire și eroare.”
„Tot mai clar se contureazã incongruenţa timpului nostru individual. Timpul tatãlui meu și timpul meu propriu nu mai coincideau.”
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April 14, 2022Вчергове почитувала - з практичної потреби, але й із великим задоволенням. Шульц досі улюблений і досі найкращий: з його дивовижними поєднаннями іменників з прикметниками, з його єресіархами, з його збоченою всеїдною плідністю матерії, з його фальшивою штукарською модерністю містечок на узбіччі історії, з його владними жінками і сновидною логікою, з його розмиванням меж між живим і неживим, істотами й неістотами, людьми і тваринами і богами, весь цей старий простір, заповнений опудалами й іншими покривленими формами хворобливого життя, які ще пам'ятають про потребу повернутися до свого деміурга, але вже його не впізнають.
З часу минулого прочитання встигла побувати в Дрогобичі, і, ви знаєте, it checks out. Що б то ще можна було писати в Дрогобичі.
З часу минулого прочитання встигла побувати в Дрогобичі, і, ви знаєте, it checks out. Що б то ще можна було писати в Дрогобичі.
May 26, 2023
Typ co miał tylko po portfel wrócić, a chyba zaczął po drodze coś wciągać
June 8, 2021
A series of stories -- or vignettes might better describe them -- about a boy's family living in the Polish city of Drogobych. The boy's father's sanity seems questionable at times. He is fascinated with science experiments, raising birds in the attic (don't even ask about the attic floor), milliner's dummies, and especially cockroaches. The description of Dad on the floor crawling like a cucharacha is enough to bring discomforting reminders of Kafka's "Metamorphosis."
While the father steals the show, there is also a wonderful character called Adela, a worker in the family home, who surfaces in many vignettes. Father finds her both fascinating and frightening. When Father gets carried away in his latest madcap pursuits, it is inevitably the young and beautiful Adela who is called on to lower the boom on any nonsense.
Still, the boy can't help but find his father a sympathetic and endearing man. It is this sympathy which gives the book its touch of innocence and charm, reminding me a bit of Dylan Thomas's rose-colored depiction of his childhood in Wales. And trust me, the Street of Crocodiles is no snowy Wales! Yet still Shulz pulls it off.
If you like description and characterization, are willing to do without plot, and want to up your game in world lit., this might be an easy (160 pp.) option for you. Sadly, based on the intro, I read that the author, who was a Polish Jew, was shot in cold blood on the streets by a SS officer in 1942 during the occupation. As we say of any writer lost before his/her time, what a loss for literature!
While the father steals the show, there is also a wonderful character called Adela, a worker in the family home, who surfaces in many vignettes. Father finds her both fascinating and frightening. When Father gets carried away in his latest madcap pursuits, it is inevitably the young and beautiful Adela who is called on to lower the boom on any nonsense.
Still, the boy can't help but find his father a sympathetic and endearing man. It is this sympathy which gives the book its touch of innocence and charm, reminding me a bit of Dylan Thomas's rose-colored depiction of his childhood in Wales. And trust me, the Street of Crocodiles is no snowy Wales! Yet still Shulz pulls it off.
If you like description and characterization, are willing to do without plot, and want to up your game in world lit., this might be an easy (160 pp.) option for you. Sadly, based on the intro, I read that the author, who was a Polish Jew, was shot in cold blood on the streets by a SS officer in 1942 during the occupation. As we say of any writer lost before his/her time, what a loss for literature!
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